


Don't Go Walkin' Down Lovers' Lane

by Neftzer_nettlestonenell



Series: The Don't Series [2]
Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Alternate Universe - Robin Hood, Channel Islands - UK, Commandos, F/M, Gen, German occupation, Guernsey, Nazis, Sark - Freeform, Special Ops, WWII, big band music, channel islands, ham radio, swing music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2018-06-03 06:08:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 64,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6599824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neftzer_nettlestonenell/pseuds/Neftzer_nettlestonenell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This...is a rescue...That goes entirely off the rails. Setting: Europe, German-Occupied British Channel Islands, 1943.  (#2 of 4)<br/>Robin Oxley, Viscount Huntingdon, long-thought dead, is alive...and the Lady Marion Nighten cannot seem to force herself to forget her former fiance's unexpected appearance in Story #1 "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree". But maybe that's because her engagement to SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer, and the German occupation of Guernsey (growing harsher every day), have her a little distracted. Oh, that, and her verboten radio broadcast: The Nightwatch.<br/>But will she be too busy dodging old feelings and the German's discovery to aid a downed Eagle Squadron pilot held captive by Gisbonnhoffer and Kommandant Vaiser at one of the SS camps on nearby Alderney? Can she bring herself to work closely with Robin--can she TRUST herself to--without slipping up?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 3:47 a.m.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Please see immediately below, and for your good mental health, and to prevent permanent mind-frell, read the establishing Alternate Timeline/Uberfiction story "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" FIRST to accustom yourself to exactly how Robin Hood and Lady Marian (and friends) have found their way into WWII Europe first.
> 
> TO WIT: There is a little known (or perhaps little-remembered) piece of history where, from July 1940 to May 1945 a certain archipelago of islands north of France, but yet British Crown Dependencies, and therefore 'British soil', were invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany.
> 
> Among other evils practiced there were the building and operating of four concentration camps on the island of Alderney.
> 
> It was a time in which the British people were fighting a war that involved long separations from family; soldiers endured (and also practiced) battlefield atrocities; those on the homefront sacrificed luxury items, and later, even essentials. The closer it came to May 1945, hardship and deprivation were rampant on all the islands. It was a war that no one thought would ever happen after 'the war to end all wars'. But it was not the Third Crusade. It was World War II.
> 
> For the residents of the Channel Islands, their upper government officials and any/all military withdrawn by the British prior to the invasion, it was a time of hunger and privation, of an oppressor's vise-like grip on the populace. It was a time in need of, a time ripe for...Robin Hood.

__  
"Don't sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me...  
Don't go walkin' down lover's lane, with anyone else but me,  
Not until you see me, not until you see me marching home."

**Channel Island of Alderney -** It was Tuesday, 3:47 a.m., and so, it must be torture.

"Thomas Carter," he again spat out (though he had not the saliva left to waste on it-there had been no water given him in over 24 hours). "Flight Commander, 2-2-6-5-4-8-3-2-3-6-Zed."

"Zed?" came the chief interrogator's question, "Zed, Blondie? _Really_? It don't take us a rocket scientist to hear you speak and know you for an American. 'Zed'? Not in their vocabulary. And what you give as your serial number? All. Wrong." The man tch-tch'ed, his face coming close, so close Carter could smell the sauerbraten from his late dinner still on his breath, its pungent mixture of vinegar and garlic.

From the shadowy corner of the small cell room Carter heard the taller Nazi, for the moment playing the 'good cop', the rational one, speak. "Why is the RAF dropping men onto the islands?"

Carter coughed and re-asserted the only statement he was permitted to make.

The far shorter, somewhat rounder man, the chief interrogator, cut him off, bored with his reiteration. "Oh," the German sang, "I'm a Yankee Doodle _Dum_ -my--a Yankee Doodle do _AND_ die...Yes, that's right, Flyboy. You patriotic sap, so desperate to join up you couldn't wait for your own country to get up off their constipated arses and go to war. Went and let the British--" he jerked his head back toward the other officer, "wait--Lieutenant--wasn't there a whole war or something or other where the Americans fought," he again brought his face close to Carter's, "and died to throw off the shackles of British tyranny? Something like that?"

"I think, perhaps, sir," the taller man smirked lopsidedly, "'twas but a mere skirmish. Certainly nothing of historical import."

"Well, not to Blondie, here, anyway. He's more than willing--desperate, even--to let his previous oppressors use him as yet another body to throw at the Reich. _Of course_ they accepted your enlistment, Thomas Carter," he lingered almost lover-like over his Christian name. "So that you might die in a Briton's place."

"Have no fear, Anglophile," the shadowed man assured him, "when you die--and if you do not talk, eventually, after much pain, and much more suffering," here came the lopsided smirk again, "you _will_ die--you may buried here, with the others, in this-- _previously_ \--British soil."

"Flight Commander," Carter again repeated. "2-2-6-5-4-8-3-2-3-6-Zed."

"Well," said the shorter man, making ready to leave the room, "we shall see, we shall see. Lieutenant, he is all yours. Do be as illuminating as possible in your report. I have always wished to know if blondes, indeed, have more fun." He made a kissy face to Carter, and chuckled maniacally, humming discordantly as he all but pranced his way out the only door.

It was just Carter and the taller man from the shadows, now, unlikely to still be playing at 'good cop'. The German's lopsided smirk, and where he chose to use it, certainly seemed to indicate a longer night yet ahead of them.

"Have the basin and the electrodes brought in," the Lieutenant shouted, to whomever was posted guard or runner outside the door.

Carter looked up as the German officer walked toward him, saw the tension spring into the lieutenant's right arm, presaging the arrival of his fist to voice box, felt himself flinch before the powerful and piercing blow actually landed.

"Now that," he thought to himself, even as he fought for breath, "was downright stupid. Punch a guy in the very place he needs if he is, as you want him to, going to talk." _Maybe he had overestimated this enemy after all._

Thomas Carter, RAF Flight Commander, Eagle Squadron 121, looked about the mostly-darkened interrogation chamber and had no fear. No fear of what had already been, night after night enacted on him, nor of what was, shortly, to come. He was not going to die. Or talk. It was only that he did, very much, wish a glass of water.


	2. A soak

**Channel Island of Guernsey** \- It was Tuesday, 3:47 a.m., and so, it must be time for a soak.

Marion Nighten opened the door to her rooms on the second floor of her island home and began to go about her usual habits after returning from broadcasting the Nightwatch. But she was only scant steps beyond the darkened threshold when she was compelled to change her plans.

In an action borne of memory, she depressed the button to turn on her bedside table lamp.

There, in the overstuffed cozy chair that sat beside her bed, Robert Oxley sat, head lolled to the side, as oblivious as a Goldilocks to the return of the three bears.

"Who's been sleeping in my chair?" Marion asked herself, but quietly, as he had not stirred upon her entrance (not a particularly quiet one, at that).

The fabric upholstery on the chair was aggressively floral, spring-like and pastel on a pale background color. It matched the tones and palette of her room, decorated for summer and airy open windows, and times of warm, sweet sea-salty air that any such vacation estate might be filled with when the family was in residence, those scant holiday weeks of the year. But it certainly did not at all match the dreary and worn colors of Robin's current attire-nor their state of relative filth.

She worried a moment whether when he did stand and wake, if a grimy imprint might not endure, permanently, on the fabric, like Peter Pan's shadow, left behind in the Darling's nursery. A constant reminder of this nighttime visit.

Such a peculiar calling card would prove a hard thing to explain to the staff.

Marion stood looking down at him, still in her pants and other mannish attire (her clothes somewhat the worse for her covert travels, but nothing compared to his, consequent of his rough--but necessary--use of them).

The standard issue knit jumper he wore, while originally issued in a dull foliage green (certainly a color that complemented him) with brown suede shoulder epaulets and elbow patches, was fraying at the hem and collar.

 _How that must nag at him so,_ she thought, _to present himself so tatty. Then again,_ she caught herself wondering, _had he even so much as glimpsed himself in a glass to know? And if not, in how long?_ It was hard to imagine, this man with Savile Row once at his beck and call (she had heard a story of him dispatching a tailor to his club at half-past midnight to refit the cut of a lapel he no longer found to be fashionable before he went out), wearing such shabby garments.

From his collar her eyes traveled up to his face (his unfamiliar beard now covering much of it). Even in sleep, a time she would expect a naivet to return, childlike innocence to peek out, she could see something there; a weightiness, a gravitas, that she was not accustomed to in him. There were unknown-to-her wrinkles, lines, a scar or two, even, whose genesis she was not acquainted with.

"Robin," she said to him from where she stood (coat as yet unremoved), for though his visage had time now painted across it, she did still recognize it as his own. "Robin."

He stirred slightly, progressed from asleep to only half-asleep, but did not awaken, the sound of her voice too much a comfort to him to wake as if to the threat of danger or pressing need. He mumbled something, followed by what was clearly her name.

"Robin," she said, a bit more sternly this time. She put her hand to his shoulder.

His eyes fluttered open for a brief second before again falling shut. They had not quite focused on her face.

"Do not go, Marion," he said-no mumbling this time, no way for her to deny she heard it. "I love you."

Her hand came away from his shoulder at the speed it might from lit burners on a gas cooker. Her head cocked as she looked him over. _Was he awake? Was he pulling a prank?_

But he did not reach for her, did not covertly open his eyes to check for her reaction. Instead, he tossed in the chair until he had repositioned himself.

 _Only in your dreams_ , Robin, she told him--though not aloud. Only in dreams could anything become of them, could any future for them exist.

She marveled at the notion, moving to the armoire to replace her coat and, as usual, encountering her far-too diverse hidden liquor cabinet. Tonight it reminded her of far too many truths that she would rather not confront with Robin in the room-conscious or un. After all, even this very day were the war to end, were every Nazi on the islands to be magically, instantly obliterated in the wake of such news, still they could not aspire to being together, to renewing their previously intimate connection. The persistent taint of her present choices surely too much to ever hope to surmount.

The public's memory of their engagement, alone, would likely be enough to sink him socially, prevent him from successfully entering a public life. Marion had no rose-colored glasses with which to see illusions about their lives. If an American divorcee could lose a King his throne (for love, it was said- _for love_ ), how much more could a believed Nazi collaborator, daughter of a recanted Lord now aiding and abetting the enemy, his home theirs, herself soon to be theirs--how much more, then, could _she_ stymie Robin's future, bright and influential as it could be: appointment to the House of Lords-or popular election to the House of Commons, a brilliant and crusading career as a barrister, a happy husband-a...luminous father?

Her choices in life (made when he was dead, when he was buried) were now, of a certain, insuperable handicaps. Life-long stigmas. When-if-peace came at the heels of an Allied triumph (and she so rarely let herself contemplate that it would), there would, most likely, be no place for one such as her in that new dawn.

Even so, she hoped-she prayed-she would live long enough to see it. And her father with her.

 _Funny,_ she thought to herself ironically, _I fight and scheme and risk my life every day to bring about a new world order in which I will certainly be denounced and eviscerated for a traitor-myself, and all whom I touch._

The 'now' was too dangerous, the 'then' too fraught with thoughts of how her assassinated reputation would prove a stumbling block to Robin's public and social life. And so, if Robin and Marion (some past-vintage of Marion--not this present one) _did_ exist together, it was only to be, it seemed, in the past.

She walked toward the door to her private, en suite bath.


	3. London Flashback

**London's West End, 1936 - Mayfair - Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house -** It was sometime well-after three in the morning. Marion was in the main floor's street-level study, to the back of the house, going over her father's most recent papers. She was neither his social nor his personal secretary, but she had fallen into the habit (to the point he had come to expect it from her) of proofing and vetting all his speeches and other writings; no other person on the planet more invested in or acquainted with his work than herself.

The built-in bookshelves ringed the room, which, despite its twelve-foot ceilings retained (to her) a comfortably snug feeling. She rolled the moving library ladder along its track, pleased that it had been greased as she had requested of their housekeeper, so that it might not disrupt anyone when she made use of it late into the night, as was her custom.

She reached for the volume of Kant, just a handbreadth beyond her grasp, when the sound of a knocking at the front door ( _A knocking? Really?_ she thought) brought her down the ladder's steps and through the ceiling-high pocket doors into the (thanks to her mother, elegant) three-story foyer.

The knocking came again.

With curiosity (it was well-after three in the a.m.) she slipped shoelessly across the marble floor, past the large, round 6-foot in diameter pedestal table (for visitors' hats and gloves), its Louis Comfort Tiffany vase seeming to explode with its filling of bright dahlias, and to the oversized front door.

Frankly, it was not a door she was used to opening. But the butler and much of the rest of the upstairs household staff were away from town, as were all the family, save herself.

When she usually encountered this door it was being held by someone for her, and opened and shut by a pair of hands not her own. It was a door of considerable size and heft.

The knocking continued.

She glanced behind her, up the long, graceful balustrade as it wound its way around the stairs, to the upper floors of the town house. Any servants asleep, long ago.

Marion reached out and opened the door.

A man leaned against the frame, his back to her, looking down at the street some twenty steps below.

She recognized his extravagantly silver roadster, left catawampus nearly half onto the sidewalk, (saved only by inches from having struck the cast-iron fencing about a tree) before she recognized him.

"Percival," he began to speak before he turned around, seeming to believe...expect? that her brother's valet would have answered the door.

He swung himself about to face the doorway, reacting as though he were about to suffer impact with something as substantial as the shut door when he saw her standing there in her borrowed-from-her-brother's-closet pajamas (lapel and button-front top, and pant bottom) and silk dressing gown.

"Angels and ministers of grace!" he exclaimed, his eyes widening and contracting at the sight of her. "Where the devil is Percival?" He listed a bit to the side.

Marion peeked her head out and looked from one end of the deserted street to the other. "Robin Goodfellow," she called him after her brother's pet name for his notoriously mischievous friend, Oxley, "keys."

He produced them without protest.

"Now take yourself into the study- _quietly_."

Oxley took a step into the foyer. As no one was present to accept his white scarf, gloves, hat and walking stick, he placed them, somewhat clatteringly, on the table.

Assuring herself that it was unlikely he was soused enough to collapse in her absence, Marion stole down the twenty or so stone steps to the sidewalk and the Buick Roadster convertible below, feeling a juicy naughtiness to be out in the air-nearly in the public street in Mayfair-in only striped silk pajamas-and a man's set, at that (for all that it had been two years since Claudette Colbert sported them at the cinema in "It Happened One Night"). This was, after all, respectable Mayfair, not bohemia, not Hollywood. Her toes, free of socks, stockings or nylons caressed the gas pedal of Oxley's car as she went about re-parking it somewhat more acceptably, curbside.

When she returned to the house (the door still standing open just as she had left it), he had done as he was bid. She found him in the study, looking about as if he very much wished someone would ask him to take a seat.

"What brings you here?" she asked, without standing on ceremony, her curiosity well piqued by such a late-night caller.

His hands ran along the leather seam of a nearby chair back. "I could not, in good conscience, (as I thought my parking job so well-illustrated) drive any farther."

She did not offer him a seat. She was quite enjoying the moment, her tone jolly, but slightly scolding. "You could not call home for a ride, or find a cabbie?"

"Ah, home," he replied, taking a deep breath, his hand on the chair stilled now as though he would grip it for support. "That would mean encountering my father. And a staff-even my man, I believe-rewarded for tattling on me."

Marion's eyebrows rose in mild surprise that this man (from what she knew of him) would care. "And your club?"

He re-gripped the chair back, as though trying to ascertain the quality of its stuffing. "Filled with his spies, no doubt."

"Bonchurch?" She asked about his best friend and constant companion.

"Otherwise...engaged." His eyes slid over to her out of the side, his head not turning. He clearly wondered if he would yet be asked to take a seat.

"So you come here?" she continued her line of questioning. "Forgive me," she finally gestured to the chair, indicating that he should seat himself if it so pleased him. "I do not mean to be inhospitable, but...why here?"

In response to her signal and the offer of a chair, he removed his tuxedo jacket and placed his bow tie (already un-done and hanging loose about his neck when he was at the door) safely in its pocket. He let the jacket lay smoothly on a nearby chair and sank into the large leather armchair with a sound that might have been the chair accepting his weight, or his own bone-deep sigh.

"Your brother, and his man Percival, are usually quite good to me on such occasions-" he paused to exonerate himself, "though such are generally rare, as a rule. Clem is well-known for a liberal and reformist, and so, unlikely, I think, to also be in the earl's pocket." Now he began to remove his cufflinks, casually turning up his cuffs until they were well to his mid-forearm. Half-way through this action, it seemed to come to him that he ought to ask her permission for so casual and informal a gesture. He made a motion to garner her consent for the cufflinks, and followed it quickly with one regarding the casting off of the studs in the first few buttonholes of his shirt.

She assented to his actions. In what way would she protest? She, herself, had gone to the door and then into the street in pajamas that were not even her own. (She was unsure upon consideration of this whether wearing her own, feminine nightclothes-from the finest ateliers in Paris-would have been better, or worse, for such an activity.)

"You will find they are neither one here," she informed him, "Clem or Percival. The house is all but closed. The family set for holiday. I alone remain, with a bare bones staff. I gave the under-butler the weekend off."

He nodded his understanding, slowly as one might expect in his condition. (Although, frankly, he was seeming less tight to her with each passing moment.) During one nod, his chin still down and his face not visible, he said, "Tish has thrown me over."

"Tish Lavely?" she asked for clarification, though she did not actually need it. All of London knew they were a couple. "Is that why you are drunk?"

"No. The drunkenness came before. And is, it would seem, the impetus for her decision, as opposed to the result of it."

Because they were immersed in such a casual atmosphere, because she had, that Season, perhaps heard a bit too much of Robin Oxley and Tish Lavely and weren't they such a glittering couple, and perhaps spent a little too much time turning over the decisions made by her brother's Lothario-of-a-friend, Marion spoke carelessly, without the filters and strictures she might, at other moments in her life, employ. Her comment was not nasty or cutting, nor meant to be. It was delivered with empathy, it was truthful and insightful, and absolutely not something to be shared publicly with a man you did not know very well, about his personal life. "The Lavelys may well be Reformers all, but you cannot be too surprised: Tish wished to reform you, not be carried off into your harum-scarum ways. You ought to better know your audience."

His bowed head jerked up at that, keen on her commentary. "Audience? What? You ask me to view my romantic affairs in a political light?"

Marion shrugged, perhaps that was a weird way to couch what she meant. "Very well: what of Bonchurch?"

Robin rubbed at his head. "Went after her. To...comfort her, I think. Seemed to think I had treated her bestially," his voice altered in his tone, as he went on, "Why would you have asked that?"

She half-smiled at his query. "It is no secret he has long pined for her."

"No," he denied it. "No? He, well, he should have told me. Tish and I were never so very serious."

Now her smile was full, almost an unsuppressable grin. _Could this man be so wrong?_ "Were you not?"

He gave no reply, but looked bewildered by her question.

Marion went to lean against her father's desk front. "Tish has told everyone she would have a string of pearls out of you-if not a promise-by Christmas."

"She has so boasted?" His tone was not soft, it had a slight edged to it.

 _Ah, so he didn't like that_. "Even to me," Marion asserted.

"What do you mean, 'even to me'?"

"Well, I am hardly a member of your set."

"And so I am such a catch-such a 'prize' among the girls of 'my set'?" He said it with stupefied wonder at the notion. And yet, also, as though he did not quite believe it.

"What else have vapid females to claim as status, when they are of no occupation but man-hunting and shopping to furnish homes they will spend time in only by short turns: the Riviera, London, Paris, perhaps a much-talked-about but rarely visited country home in the North?"

He did not address her unsympathetic view of the female of the species. "No, Tish has no 'country home'."

"She is rarely out of London longer than the length of a day."

"She is...quite a female." For a moment he seemed lost in starry-eyed contemplation of this-of what had drawn him to the stunning sophistication of Miss Lavely in the first place. "You think so badly of the town?"

She moved toward a far table nearby the chess set. She stopped a moment to contemplate the pieces, set mid-match. "I think that for every man that London and town society will prove the making of, it will, for ten women and girls, prove the utter ruin of."

He considered her assertion. "But not men?"

"Oh, there are plenty of men find their way to ruin, here."

"And you think me such a wastrel? And Tish a bad match for me?"

She reached the tray of cold beef and nibbles she had brought up from the kitchen, the staff always seeing to it that she never lacked during her evening-to-dawn marathons. "I can't say, truly, that I've spent much time thinking about either of you," she shrugged, until this very night she certainly would not say that she had. "You have always been Clem's friend, and you and I rarely in company since you were sent to school and on to university. The large part of my acquaintanceship with you since then has been the occasional mention of you in Clem's letters home, and whatever gossip might currently be swirling around you."

She gesticulated toward the beef. He waved his hand to decline the snack.

"Do you always dress so," he started onto a new topic, "of an evening?" His eyes had been occasionally lingering on her daring choice of attire since shortly after his admission into the house.

"What?" the change of topic surprised her. "Oh. Well, not so that my father might see."

"But as you have said, the house is your own, the family away." He did not say it in a particularly pert way, but then again, he had a certain way where nearly anything he said might have a pert spin to it.

Something told her she ought to remind him, before things got any more _intentionally_ pert, his eyes any more...interested...in her clothing choices, of where he was and what the true facts of the matter were. "I will be joining them soon enough. The house is not _entirely_ empty of staff."

He smiled, as though knowing exactly what she was doing, and also as though he had not been entirely aware of what _he_ had been doing. "And what do you find yourself doing of a night such as this, attired such as...that?"

Her eyes shot over to where it lay. "I was finishing my edits on Lord Nighten's coming address."

His head inclined to the side, curiosity growing around the corners of his eyes. "And does he take your revisions to heart?"

"Generally, I would say he is very fair-minded in his acceptance and approval of them."

"Then you say that when I hear Sir Edward on radio giving just such an address, I am also hearing your thoughts as well?" He seemed charmed by the notion.

"That may be somewhat overstate-"

He hurried on, not letting her debunk the idea. "Then I see that in future I must pay more attention."

"It is late," she began.

"Yes, and yet you are awake, having, it would seem," he referenced the tray of beef and nibbles and such, "high tea."

"It is my way," she acquiesced.

"You are often about at such an hour? Here? At home-in the study?" His lower lip butted out as he shook his head. "I had never known it."

"Well," she counseled him, "if Clem and Percival were smuggling you about the house quietly, why would you have?"

"Indeed." He looked at her.

She noted to herself that his eyes were blue, but not so blue as to be the first thing one might notice about him. She noted how his fingers so rarely sat quietly, but were instead constantly drumming or fiddling with something, though the impression of such busy activity did not give one the feeling he was not paying attention. Rather, in this moment, quite the opposite. His long gaze became too much. Had anyone else been present she would have turned to them and begun a conversation about anything to escape it.

But there was no one else present. "What?"

"Why are you so sweet to me," he asked, his stare at her continuing. "Letting me in, giving me food and shelter when the people who ought to do such are naught but cross and disapproving?"

She considered his question. "Perhaps it is easier to tend to a distant friend in need than an errant lover...or profligate son."

"Why call you me an 'errant lover'?"

She gave a voiceless chuckle. "Because you are but hours-if that long-of being thrown over by your Tish, and yet here you are, casting semi-lecherous glances at me in my pajamas-"

"They _are_ very easy on the eye..."

"-like Romeo forgetting his Rosaline upon sighting Juliet at the party."

"Ah," he contested her assessment of him, "but I am hardly pining for Tish. The drunkenness, I did clarify-did I not?- _incited_ the row, it did not come after it. Tish 'twas only a bit of fun, there. Until recently, when it stopped being fun, and started to feel more like employment."

"I think you could probably benefit from constructive employment of some kind."

His face showed surprise. "Could I?" He smiled, "and shall you be the one to give it me?"

She shot him a stinging look, without the matching emotion behind it. "Stop acting as though I am some sort of spinstery librarian, unaware of how to have a good time, and you must tutor me at how to let my hair down." Her words were somewhat cross, but she found herself in too good a mood to deliver them in the same fractious spirit.

His smile increased. "So you do _know_ how to have a good time? Whenever we encounter one another socially it seems to me you are more often in deep political discussions with your father's aged colleagues than on the arm of deserving young men. And really, it is not fair. Deserving young men, I am told, are not entirely at a loss when it comes to political ideas and the debating thereof. Particularly with someone displaying such a finely polished set of toes."

She followed his sightline down to her feet, where her red, red toenails were indeed peeking out from under the cuffs of Clem's borrowed pajama pants. She ignored his comment, and withdrew the toes to the safety of the wide cut of the pant leg. "Do you not miss your time in the country? Miss activity? Clear air, blue sky, and early risings? And... _some_ version of utility?"

He sighed, collapsing his upper body into the back of the chair. "I am suffocated everywhere I go."

"Perhaps you are not looking hard enough for what you wish to find-a much needed purpose to your existence."

But he seemed somewhat through for the moment with that angle of their discussion. "What I look and see, here, is a pretty girl-a beautiful girl, actually-who is in need of a good time. Her family is away at present, though she is, herself, soon meant to join them. I can think of nothing more natural than her brother's friend stopping by tomorrow in the early evening to take her out. Assuming, of course, you will have risen from bed by seven, in the p.m."

She smiled, though she turned him down. "I have no interest in being your means of spiting Tish Lavely."

"And I have no interest in doing so," he countered. "I do have interest, I find, in having a conversation with you-very like this one-when I have not overindulged. Amazingly, I have only this night grown a yen to do something when sober. So, let us make the date. I will not drink, on my honor-I do believe, lady, there is yet some of it left to swear by-and you may do, or not do, as you please. Drink, dance, debate politics, visit a settlement house, found a secret society to abolish world tyranny. The plan of action shall be entirely yours."

Marion did not bother to decline such a grandiose invitation, never for a moment believing in its sincerity, despite its being rendered in his compellingly charismatic way.

She saw him upstairs, to a guest room, but the next day he was gone by the afternoon time she, herself, rose. Surprisingly (to herself) she felt regret at his unannounced departure. She found she had wished to have brunch with him.

Out of doors the silver roadster was gone from where she had parked it on the street. She did not have any illusions that she would see it again anytime soon.


	4. Engaging the Taps

Marion engaged the hot and cold taps, letting them run apace into the claw-footed porcelain tub. She cast a glance back over her shoulder through the open doorway toward Robin, still asleep in the chair. He did not stir.

Since the night of her kidnapping by his man, Allen Dale masquerading as her 'cousin', she had heard nothing of his unit's movements or action on the islands. She did not even know if Guernsey was the location they considered their home base. Which was good. It was excellent. Certainly they would operate better and more safely by drawing little attention or suspicion to themselves.

More than once, though, since that night she assented to dance with him as she broadcast the Nightwatch, Marion had _nearly_ convinced herself she _had_ seen him. More than several times: among the stalls at the market in St. Peter Port; walking among a crowd; browsing among the stacks at the library (what was left of it); once, on a bicycle in the capitol city's traffic. It had not been dissimilar to when she had first returned to London upon receiving the initial news of his death: the pervasive (but deceptive) feeling that he was still everywhere about, and that he might turn up, or she sight him at any moment.

Robin had brought her the news of Geis' new orders, that night of her engagement party. And his information had proven sound. Geis had left for that duty on Alderney at the camps all but immediately the next morning. That had been nine weeks ago. She had not seen him since, letters and gifts brought to her by German couriers their only contact, as no inter-island telephone system yet existed. The Lieutenant's absence had proven a huge relief to her, coming so close on the heels of his hope to celebrate (rather, 'seal the deal' of) their engagement in a physical fashion.

Marion bent at the waist to situate the metal tray bath caddy closer to one end of the tub than the other (in an effort to shield a lap), and draped a towel over it, so that it looked of a little table replete with tablecloth, and turned the taps to 'off'. It was a far-fuller bath than she would usually draw for herself.

She poured in some salts she had for just such occasions: Epsom, and removed her fancy (but rather ineffectual) French soaps from reach, replacing them in the dish with something tougher and less perfumed of lavender and rose petals.

_Why was Robin here? Now? Surely he would not risk such a visit unless it were absolutely necessary-or unless something were gravely wrong. But if something were gravely wrong he was proving awfully cavalier about it, letting himself drop off to sleep so. Well, time to go find out._

She took one last look around and walked back into the bedroom, thinking that she ought, probably, to "just in case" arm her pistol, which she had placed back in the armoire. There was no telling who might have followed him, for all that she felt her house safe enough at present.

Marion observed as the slight clicking sound of the pistol's barrel curiously brought Robin immediately out of his slumber.

His eyes, open and alert, immediately snapped onto her form where she stood by the armoire, registering that the pistol was in _her_ hands. They then took in the relatively bright level of light in the room.

"Is this safe?" he asked, without other salutation, his breath a bit rushed.

She shrugged. "I am well established as a night owl."

"So I well recall," he replied, working one of his shoulders over and back again trying to stretch out his sleeping-in-a-chair kinks.

They were proving all-business to each other, no chatter. No 'how-do-you-do's.

"You would not easily waken," she informed him. "I thought something wrong." She had finished with the pistol.

Robin looked drawn, concerned, not a speck of humor about him. His eyes seemed to alert her that he was wrestling with what he must say next, and the idea of it gave him a rather sour stomach.

She took the moment to seize on his obvious indecision. "I have drawn you a bathe. I suggest you make use of it, as you seem to have the time to do so," she indicated his sleeping, meaning for it to come out as a light-hearted jibe, as though he had been being lazy. But due to his air of internal vexation, the dig fell flat. "The water will cool soon enough to unpleasant," she added, more quietly.

"Until recently," he told her, obviously making an effort to hold back in whatever was so fretting him, "we have been washing in the sea or what safe waters we might find." He seemed to wish to explain his grubby condition. "Of late is has become too cool, and sometimes, too dangerous to do so."

"No worries," Marion assured him. "I bathe nightly at this time. The running taps and creaking pipes will signify nothing unusual to anyone. My bath shares a common wall with father's. If we play something along the lines of what is now acceptable music, I think we shall trouble no one-any more than I might usually do on my own." She stepped to her record player and dropped the needle onto an Edith Piaf album.

"Heaven bless your nocturnal ways," he said, his expression, for a moment, turning almost sweet. "I do not know, quite frankly, as long as I have constantly had them on, if these duds will agree to part with my flesh. But, we shall see. Or, rather, _I_ shall see."

Assuming his comment for an invitation to impropriety, she told him, "You are a wonder, Robin." She had not marked the fact that his comment provoked no sparking of his eyes as it might usually.

"Marion," Robin told her, like a man only half-alive, and that half beyond exhaustion-both physically and mentally. "You need fear nothing of me. I am not feeling vaguely amorous tonight." He dragged a straight-back chair away from her letter-writing desk and placed it alongside the doorway to the bath, situating it with its back to the wall. "You must sit, though, as we must make use of this time to speak." He patted the seat of the newly arranged chair, illustrating to her where he wished her to sit during their conference.

She removed her shoes, and watched as he sat on the barely-substantial-enough-to-hold-his-weight stool trimmed in crinoline at her vanity and unstrung his boots quietly, not letting them drop to the floor, and proceeded into the bathroom.

As he had requested, she took up her position on the straight-back chair to the sounds of him, over her right shoulder, testing his theory about whether his clothes would agree to come off.

She caught the sounds of the bath water being disturbed as he lowered himself slowly into it. The small sounds he, himself, made in response to the soothing heat and Epsom, and the enveloping comfort of the water.

"Your men are here, also?" she asked, testing the waters conversationally.

"They are on perimeter outside, much as we employ wherever we are of a night. They will sleep by turns, watch by turns."

"And so you need be in no hurry?" _Why was it so important to her that he have a moment without hurry, without worry or urgency or pressing engagement elsewhere? Why did she wish so strongly in her very core that he bathe and be allowed to fall back to sleep-even if only for an hour?_

At her spoken question he was instantly wary. "Unless you've a reason to hurry me along..."

"No! No." She tried to assure him, "The staff are asleep, and too tired, I assure you, to go about nighttime spying on us. The Nightens are far too dull to inspire such attention. Geis has no reason to suspect anything of _us_. As long as you were undetected in your arrival, I think us...as safe as anywhere on the island. Safer, certainly, than some places."

There was a momentary silence.

"I am-" he began, a new topic, if his change in tone were to be believed.

"Robin, this is foolish," Marion interrupted him, her bum already out of the chair. "Why can't I just-"

"Marion, don't," his tone commanded, quite harshly. "Do not come-"

It was too late. She was into the bathroom (knowing that she had placed the tray caddy in a spot over his lap to save either of them any modesty they might feel).

His commandment fell away from his lips, unfinished. Her continuing planned protestation over the absurdity of speaking to him without being allowed to look him in the face turned to vapor.

"What," she asked, her tone like that of a ghost as she encountered the mangled flesh of his left side, "is that?"

"I told you not to come in." His eyes were cast away from her gaping stare, but there was nowhere for him to go, to hide. He was trapped in the bath. "I did not _think_ you would come in." His mouth stretched into an ever-thinning line.

 _That is the other Marion you are thinking of_ , she reminded him, but only in her own head. She watched with keen, almost grotesque interest Robin's expanding-and-contracting-with-breath left side, the scarring there brutal, though healed, the mark he bore speaking of something, some violence endured far worse than even this disfiguring flesh could imply. "The plane crash..." she began the explanation for him.

"Happened," he affirmed. "A lucky break for HQ," he asserted, some bitter to his tone.

"The others?" she asked, of the newspaper-dubbed 'Saintly Six'.

"You have not seen John-that is, Iain Johnson, in the light of day. The beard he wears covers his scarring, save where it grows patchily on his right side, where his face was most-badly burned-melted like candle's wax-by the fire."

"Airplane fuel," she said, hollowly, more than a little to herself. _How many times she had imagined-had she lived-that crash, walked herself through the possible horrors of it, the names of those five other men in her mind; and Robin, dying, writhing, in torment, in unspeakable pain, gruesomely killed in the wreckage and ensuing fire?_

"Royston has retained something of a limp, and Wills has lost all hearing in his left ear."

"Dale?" she asked.

"Left sightless for six weeks from the fumes. Thought he would be blind evermore." He chuckled once, though ruefully. "Still managed to find the right place to pinch on all the nurses."

"And Mitch?"

He brought his eyes back to hers. "Thought we would lose old Bonchurch altogether. He was thrown clear of the debris and wreckage, as he had been the one nearly set to jump. But he turned himself 'round and rushed in where angels fear to tread to pull me out before the fuel ignited. Had quite a chunk of steel in me, just there. I do not think anyone at MI-6 expected us to survive, much less be of any use to them."

"MI-6?" she asked, her mind further ahead in assembling the puzzle than she realized. "Then, Clem...Clem _knew_."

Robin spoke to try and stop her conclusion jumping. "I do not know that..."

She spoke on, not hardly aware anymore than she shared this room with anyone else, much less with Robin. " _He_ sent me the telegram. Signed it with his name. With his sympathies." Her eyes blinked several times in quick succession, as if trying to get her bearings.

"Marion, stop," Robin would have reached out to her had she not been so far away. "I do not know that he knew. That he even yet knows. I have not since seen him, and perhaps his security clearance is not so high that he would have been made aware of our survival. Of the ensuing cover up of it."

She shook her head at all other possibilities. "Clem knew." She would not be persuaded otherwise. She had been betrayed. By her own brother. "Does your father know you live," she asked, a coldness settling about her as she, for the second time in two months, had to reorganize all that she believed true in her world.

"No."

"And so he thinks himself without a son, without a family?"

"If I survive the war, I shall be the first to alert him otherwise-no doubt with delivery of a hefty bill from some shop or other." But he did not laugh at his small joke, instead he hissed, as though something hurt or stung.

Marion's head snapped around at the noise he made.

"'Tis only the water's salts," he tried to convince her.

She stepped back toward the doorway, and made a quick but thorough inspection of his back. There, just above his lowest ribs, sat a cut of some four inches, festooned with stitches. "Who has been practicing their embroidery on you? The Scotsman, wasn't it?"

"It was John-how did you know? He is our medic."

"The way the stitching is tied off. It was done by someone with quite large fingers."

"And so it is a clumsy job?" He winced as the salted water again invaded the cut. His words were playful, but his tone muted. "I shall have yet another blemish to explain to young ladies who interrupt me in the bath?"

"If it will heal," she probed at it lightly with her fingertips. "I do not think it will give you further trouble. But I do see how having it would have impeded your sea-bathing."

He remained facing away from her, speaking to the far wall. "You do not ask how I came by it."

"'Tis best that I do not know."

"Unlike how you know," he turned the moment on a dime, "how you've imagined the crash was? For I saw it just now in your eyes: comprehension, and horror."

She did not tell him how she had found herself obsessed with such accidents, how she had read flight manuals, accident reports, anything she could get her hands on at the time to elucidate to her, to educate her on what his final moments might have been like.

He had not stopped speaking. "Marion-it is wrong for your eyes to ever look that way." He hung his head, his eyes now studying the bath caddy tray. "I am...sorry...to have caused grief. To anyone. To Bonchurch's mother, to the Earl, even. But mostly to you, Marion. If I had had faith in you-faith that what became of me still might have mattered to you-perhaps, perhaps I would have refused to be complicit in their cover-up of us six."

 _Perhaps_ , she thought (it struck her as a dangerous thing to admit, even to herself), _had all that not happened I might never have cast off my pride and acknowledged fully and for certain how much I did. Care._

She had found a cloth and a small basin, which she filled with un-Epsomed water, and brought the mildest soap she had with her back to the end of the tub, and without asking his consent, she began to wash the area of the stitching, hoping it was not too late to yet do some good and fend off any coming-on infection.

He did not speak to again warn her away, nor to flirt with her. He did not comment on the fact that this intimate moment of succor was certainly not something he could have likely expected from that Marion of the past. He simply let be.

The plashing of the water and the noise of the drips as she wrung out the cloth were the only sounds in the room.

She could not see his face, though it was probably for the best. She put her trust in his earlier declaration that he was not of an amorous bent this night, and her actions she certainly did not intend in any such a way. She did move from the area of the stitches to his back entire, noting how clouded the water in the tub had become as the dirt soaked out of his skin. As she brought her hand with the cloth up to his right shoulder for the second time, he caught it, in earnest, with his.

The cloth she had held plopped wetly into the bath water.

She froze. And tried to take it back, determining to retreat again out of the room until he was finished with his own ministrations, so certain she was she had overstepped and wakened a sleeping dragon.

"I am here," he began, his tone (surprisingly not at all randy) sounding unfamiliarly of defeat, "to ask you to do something I would counsel you against."

Marion relaxed her hand onto his shoulder, did not fight against his grip on it, but did not reply.

"Because there is no other way, no plan I can think up without needing you, and a man's life-and the lives of who knows how many others depend upon it."

She looked to his hand, grasping hers. "Go on."

"Eagle Squadron 121 Flight Commander Thomas Carter had to bail out over the Atlantic near Burhou, abandoning his burning Spitfire to the ocean. He was shortly captured and taken to the Alderney camps, where he has been more or less continually tortured since. It is our intention to rescue him."

She asked the first reasonable question that occurred to her. "How do you know your information is accurate? Perhaps he will not talk."

"No, the intelligence is sound. It comes to us by way of Dale, who drives for the Kommandant. Eagle Squadron is made up of Americans who wanted into the fight, and chose not to wait for their country, signing up with the RAF instead. As to this soldier's talking? Everyone breaks, Marion," he turned his head 'round so that he might see her. "Everyone. We must get to him before he does."

"So I shall get a key? Something from Geis? And you and your men will-"

"No," his eyes were so hard in reply it felt they were boring into the back of her skull. "We will not be there. You must go alone. You are going to be kidnapped."

She lightly scoffed. "Why would Geis kidnap _me_?"

At that he turned the rest of himself about at the waist to meet her question. But still the hand held hers. The intensity of his gaze held. His eyes widened slightly in answer.

"Oh." So it would be a bluff-the flier meant to 'kidnap' her and use her as his means out of the camp. "So I am to be a hostage."

"As I said, if I could think of any other way to get onto the island and affect his rescue, I would have done so days ago. I would be there right now. However, in two days it is the fourteenth of October. Do you know what day that is?"

"Thursday?" She looked at him. "What?"

"Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's birthday, I am reliably told." His eyes narrowed. "Are you saying you did not know?"

"It rings some sort of a bell," she told him, now herself bluffing, "if a distant one."

Robin outlined the plan. "It has been arranged for you be taken to Alderney by a chap we know (whom you will confess to having bribed), because you are so terribly desperate to be reunited with your lover, and spend that birthday with him. Our chap's boat should also prove a reliable means of escape. But Carter (and you, his hostage) shall have to abscond with and pilot it on the return journey, as our chap will have to stay behind to sell his story, and keep his involvement with us secret."

Marion did not agree to the plan, instead announcing, "the water has cooled too much. You had best get out, or you will be set for a chill."

"No doubt," he said, not pressing her for an answer, looking down to the discolored water he was set to leave behind, "I shall prove less-insulated than before, as the layers of dirt surely shielded me somewhat from the cold."

She left the room before he stood up, closing the door softly behind her, and went to the tray of food the staff had left out to think about what he had proposed.

 

* * *

From the side of the bed that was furthest from the door leading to the hall, she pulled out a rarely-used trundle bed. The staff, thankfully, always kept it impeccably sheeted and tidy.

When Robin reappeared from the bath, re-clad, somewhat ridiculously (but what could you do?) in his filthy clothes, she offered it to him.

"It will serve better than the chair," she assured him. "There is some short time left before dawn, and when you must leave."

"And so you are up, just such as this, always after the Nightwatch?" he asked as he put a knee into the low trundle mattress.

"Yes," she assented.

"I shall think of you, thus," he said, the first smile of the night playing at his lips, "after you stop transmitting: brunched, bathed, and bedded down."

"You listen to the Nightwatch?" she asked, a peculiar feeling of flattery coming over her.

"When we are near a wireless. The lads are quite curious who the American girl on the islands is. Dale, I believe, is most-especially taken with her."

"Well," she responded, that peculiar feeling not yet abated. "I shall surely tell Fred's sister Josie the next time I speak with her."

"Who?" he asked, confused by her reply. "Fred?"

"Oh," she sighed," just...some people I used to know."

She turned and tried to settle herself on the bed among the sheets and comforter.

Robin's mind, or at least his conversation, veered away from the question mark of Fred and to present worries. "Will your people not note that this has been slept on?"

"Easily fixed," she promised him, as she turned off the light, the black-out curtains over her windows making the room deeply dark, indeed. "Before leaving in the morning I shall spill something on my sheets," she reminded him of the tray of food that had been left out for her. "And explain that I had an accident while eating in bed, and so moved to spend the rest of my night on the trundle."

He smiled into the dark, impressed at her ready reply. "And you are not afeared of my potentially taking advantage of you in...a situation such as this?"

"No, for I now know," she referenced his stitches, "just where to strike you to bring about the most hurt. Do I not?"

"Marion," he lightly chuckled. "You are cold."

"Yes," she agreed, nodding into the darkness. "And that is why I must work very hard to convince Geis that something must have stoked an ardor within me," she sighed, "making me so very desperate to see him that I have bribed a boatman to ferry me to Alderney."

She could not see Robin's face now in the darkness on the trundle mattress below, nor know how fearful he was of this "no other way" plan, as if Marion were instead speaking of the boatman Charon taking coin to ferry her across an expanse not of the Atlantic, but of the river Styx to Alderney, the Hades beyond. And that _he_ had condemned her to such.


	5. The Gift of a Hairpin

**Channel Island of Alderney -** "Diefortner," the Kommandant interrupted his own dictation-giving, addressing his eager-to-advance adjutant whose nose, til then, had been studiously buried in transcribing. (A rare moment when it was not, figuratively, buried in this, his commanding officer's, arse.)  
"Ja, Kommandant?"  
"How is that girl working out, the one I had you find for Gisbonnhoffer? Things going," he ran his tongue across the front of his top teeth, "...quite carnally, there? Quite as...unwholesomely...as I'd hoped? Or shall we have to find him another?"  
Diefortner rushed to vindicate himself. He, more than others, knew that any foot soldier was only as important to the Kommandant as their last success, the most-recent triumph they had provided Vaiser. "I am informed that things have, indeed, proven quite...satisfying...numerous reports of 'happy endings' and whatnot for the Lieutenant where his newly appointed secretary is concerned."  
"But can she type, Underlieutenant? After all, as long as we must pay to keep the wench around, board and clothe her as well, she might as well be of some clerical use to the Reich, don't you think?"  
"When I screened her, Sir, she was made to provide proofs of her proficiency both in German and in typing."  
"Hmm. Where did you say you found her, again?"  
"Among the Russian laborers brought in to build our fortifications, Herr Kommandant."  
"Splendid. Splendid. One so hates to outsource where unnecessary."  
"And so you hope to distract the Lieutenant with this piece of tender Russky flesh?"  
The Kommandant shot him a slow, dangerous look. He would rather be the one to expound (at his discretion, at his deigning to interact with his inferiors) upon any devious plans of manipulation, rather than have them interrogated out of him by, of all people, his own adjutant. Nonetheless, he admired the underlieutenant's appetite and curiosity for exploitation, and so he would on this occasion instruct the younger man on his better's cunning arrangement.  
"Our plan," he stroked the younger man's ego by including him in the possessive pronoun, "is to wean Geis away from this ridiculous infatuation with the islander--who is not even really an islander, but a vacationing British citizen, and a member of their substandard little class of nobility." He snorted. "Engagement! Yes, 'Lady' Marion Nighten is to become less and less at the front of his mind; the Fatherland, and his all-consuming duty to it, evermore at his core."  
"And you believe Anya Grigorovna the most expedient way to bring this about?"  
"A dog well-fed, well-bred, and well-exercised is far less likely to bite his master, Diefortner. So, I have assigned Gisbonnhoffer here to work long shifts where I can keep my eye on him. I have provided a pretty--is she...pretty, would you say?--"  
"Ja, Herr Kommandant. One would say she could nearly pass for Aryan."   
The Kommandant sent him a doubtful, and warning look.   
The Underlieutenant quickly corrected himself, "Nearly."  
Vaiser continued on as though he had only stopped a moment for breath, not for his adjutant's response, "--girl for him to play or scrap with, as he chooses, quartered within his own office, always available to him; and the opportunity to advance beyond his wildest dreams, should he excel at his duties."  
"Really, very shrewd dealings, Sir."  
The Kommandant gave a dismissive grunt to the compliment, picking up the next communiqué to dictate his reply to. "Now," he said, his tone a throwaway, "if only he can manage to get 'Our American Cousin' to talk."

* * *

Thomas Carter again tallied the visible knots in the wooden door. It was no easy task, as the light level in the small closet was minimal. But no hard task, either, as he had all-but memorized every one of them several days ago. So even in the dark he knew their shape, what things they looked of to him: a twist of salt-water taffy from Atlantic City's boardwalk, his babushka's--his mother's mother's--oversized chin, the spill of blood on snow from Pedersan's wounding in the Winter War--the one that ultimately claimed his life. Strikingly, the wooden door they adorned had proven quite similar to the last door Carter was forced to look at while in captivity; almost two months that time, in Soviet hands, the knots and burls of that door speaking to his mind similarly. He could not say the monotony in his interpretation of the wood was a comfort.  
On the other side of the closet door he heard the creak of the desk chair as Gisbonnhoffer tilted it back and slung his long legs atop the blotter on his desk.  
"God Save the King," came a woman's voice over static-y reception, which did not alter it enough to disguise the Southern drawl of her American English. "Vive la France, and God Bless America. It's two o'clock...and so begins the Nightwatch." The verboten swell of Billie Holiday's singing filled the Nazi's office.  
"Keep talking, my dear," Gisbonnhoffer crooned to the unknown woman on the other end of the radio broadcast, "That's right. You will slip up. You will."   
The sound of the Lieutenant's head laying against the wall gave Carter all the picture that he needed of his tormentor in his mind: his eyes closed, the better to be alert should any tell-tale sound invade the airwaves and give up her position.   
Such was the Nazi lieutenant's nightly obsession. Every night, back to the office by two, turn on the wireless and wait for the Nightwatch to unwittingly give herself away.

* * *

 

"We shall see how you enjoy my freedom, since I cannot grant you your own, Thomas Carter," Gisbonnhoffer had sneered to him after one particularly long and unproductive session of interrogation. "You have made it quite apparent to all here that solitary confinement does little to shake your resolve, 2-2-6-5-4-8-3-2-3-6-Zed. Therefore, you shall be confined elsewhere. You shall have the opportunity to see how the Reich treats those who are cooperative." The tall man leaned in closer to him, placed a hand familiarly on the back of the metal chair he was tied to. "You shall smell my food, hear the respect given me by the men. You shall never be without me, in. your. head. In short, you shall bear witness to my life. My control of the world around me. And to your utter lack of same."  
Which was how he came to be chained here in a tight closet space within the camp office of Gisbonnhoffer. And indeed he did smell the SOB's food, overhear all sorts of ridiculous obeisances done him by his various underlings. But as for having the Nazi sadist in his head? Well, he had thus far proven mentally strong enough to easily resist that. And for all that, of a two a.m. hour he would prefer, thanks, to be sleeping in order to recover any strength that might still answer to his call, the sounds of Billie Holiday were better far than the profound soundlessness of Solitary, and this broadcasting Southern girl's voice a balm to the most ravaged soul, even that of a Jersey Boy.  
Most of the time he thought the Lieutenant's plan for him ridiculous, chaining him here by wrist and ankle to newly-installed metal rings bolted to the floor and walls, the manacles wearing away his skin where they sat. His hungry mind learned things by leaps and bounds about the German occupation of the islands, their future plans, their most basic and day-to-day operations. He was all but brimming with clandestine intelligence. He absolutely itched to be debriefed.  
Most of the time he thought the Lieutenant all but laughable. Most of the time. And then there were the times the Nazi attacked, debased his Secretary just beyond that door. Carter had no indication that the German knew how such violence affected him, nor how deeply, and on how intimate a level. It was hellish to overhear, knowing what was taking place, knowing himself at present powerless to prevent it, or escape from it.  
At times Gisbonnhoffer would all but treat the woman named Anya as though she were little more than office furniture, or a convenient domestic. Other times, he would physically assault her as though he could not breathe otherwise, as though he were consumed by some bent passion for her, forcing himself (though in her position she could offer little enough resistance) on her, gruffly calling 'Marion, Marion' over and over again until he was spent and briskly dismissed her from his presence.  
Thankfully he had never yet thought to open the closet door to check on his peculiarly quartered prisoner in those ensuing moments, or he would have found a true weakness with which to torment his captive.   
No matter how many times such attacks occurred, they raised the hair on the back of Carter's neck, brought out an instant sweat on his brow, and fueled a rage in his belly like few he had ever known.  
Once, only minutes after such an assault had concluded, with Gisbonnhoffer off to the head to freshen up, the prisoner tasked with removing and emptying Carter's piss bucket (a short Gypsy boy, perhaps all of sixteen years old) jerked open the closet door to find him thus.  
The boy's dark eyes registered Carter's distress, and something else, too: a surprise that this man would react so. Well, they had probably impressed upon this poor kid that he, Carter, was some sort of animal, like as not to bite off the kid's hand if he got too close. Feast on those tender, dark eyes like succulent jumbo Black Sea caviar.  
Who would expect a monster kept in a dark closet, after all, to show pangs of sympathy? To express emotion beyond rabid fury?  
He guessed at the Gypsy's origin really, (was there no one these dogs would not persecute?) as somewhere near Russia, where the other forced labor not island-based had been shipped from: "Spasiba," he said (not knowing how to make himself understood in Romany), thanking the boy for removing the bucket, despite the fact that he had not been fed or watered in twelve hours, and the metal pail was bone-dry empty.  
At his speaking the boy's dark eyes reacted again, and the boy managed a frightened, "nichivoah" in reply, before replacing the bucket, re-securing the closet door, and scurrying out of the office.  
Idiot, Carter berated himself at the boy's departure. He had slipped up, there, and given them something, if the boy handed it on--which most likely he would, himself a cruelly treated inhabitant here as well, willing, no doubt, to broker any information in return for an alleviation of his own dismal condition.  
To task Romany with emptying human waste--it was an especially cruel punishment for members of a society concerned with purity. Carter knew these Germans too well to think that such an assignment was arbitrary.  
He felt badly for the boy, but worried that he, himself, was set to feel far more badly in the near future, should the boy pass on that he had gotten the flier to talk--and in Russian, at that.

* * *

 

He did not have to wait long for his feared reprisal. He was not quite asleep some two hours later when he heard the floorboards in the office creak under someone's weight, though no one had turned on a light. The door to his closet cracked open. He was set back, leaning against the furthest corner (though, all-told, the distance to make it such was negligible), his feet in front of him should he need them for kicking. They had taken his boots shortly after he arrived, laces and all, so that he was barefoot, the soles of his feet now blistered, and infected from days' worth of splinters as the Germans had walked him about on crudely made wood floors none had bothered (in this prison camp) to sand or lacquer.  
It was so dark the person's features were hard to make out. But a streak of light from the uncurtained window fell across a hand, which revealed to him it was a woman's, the fingers long and graceful. This woman was on her knees, her elbows resting on the floor, long curly hair (the room too dark to reveal its color) pooling on the floor around her shoulders.  
She began speaking rapidly to him in Petrograd-accented Russian. Her words were hushed, but they tumbled out of her like a mountain spring spilling out over rocks.  
"I am Anya Grigorovna. The Gypsy boy told me about today. You must have hope. I have sent for someone to come for you. I do not know when they will come, or how, but I have brought you this," she produced a medium-sized hairpin, which she pressed into his disinterested, limp, hand.  
He looked at her, his first glimpse of the woman Gisbonnhoffer so viciously used. The woman on whose account he suffered, time and time again. Certainly she was pretty enough in her own right to inspire in any man a feeling of excitement, such that the Lieutenant ought not need his thoughts of this 'Marion' to carry the day.  
She was a good actress. He utterly believed her terror at the possibility of being caught, believed she would have formed some sort of friendship with the Gypsy boy. Believed she would feel something like pity for the man in the closet.  
So, she was to be the means of this new plan (whatever it was) to trap him into talking, to breaking. Very well, he welcomed the challenge.  
The hairpin, of course, was the true sign of brilliance. He never would have fallen for her having produced the actual key to the manacles, nor any sort of tool that might work as a cutter. But a hairpin? Genius. And just the right size to fit into his mouth for safekeeping until the right moment.  
Before depositing it there, he decided, what the heck?, to ask her more about this 'big breakout' she had arranged on his behalf.  
He matched her Russian, even down to the accent, though his had, perhaps, a bit more of his mother's Leningrad in it. "Come with me."  
"No," she checked the office behind her, and door to the hallway beyond, her demeanor still perfectly fearful. "I cannot leave. I have family here. Much family. If I run, they will kill them all."  
Just, he thought, his eyes narrowing with the thought, as if you do not do this--set me up for a fall--they will hurt them to punish you. He did not begrudge her her decision to work for the enemy. In such situations, he well knew, everyone made their own choices according to their own weaknesses, their own endurance levels and psychological toughness. He must remember not to judge this woman.  
"Then why help me," he asked, curious to know what answer she might come up with, to see if they had prepped her for that one.  
"Because I saw you the day they brought you here, to be caged in this closet. After all they had done to you, you were laughing...do you recall it? On the wrong side of your face."  
It was a good thing he had not placed the hairpin yet into his mouth, or he would have swallowed it, it and any chance he had to flee this hell-on-earth anytime soon.  
"Why do you say that to me," he asked, for the first time that day feeling the dryness of his throat, the parched splits in his dehydrated lips.  
"Your father, Prince Igor Fomovich Komonoff, was kind to me when I was a child. You look very like him."  
Certainly his own mother had said it often enough to him, his babushka had spent years off-and-on lamenting the fact, the resemblance between him and his father who had not been able to escape the October Revolution with his family, who had been trapped behind as Lenin, and eventually Stalin, came to power.  
"You," she named him, "are Prince Alexsei Igorovich Komonoff, an exiled émigré. I will do anything in my power to help your father's son."  
He shook his head, coolly refuting her assertion. "I am Thomas Carter, Flight Commander, 2-2-6-5-4-8-3-2-3-6-Zed," adding to himself, 'citizen of the United States of America, and resident of the state of New Jersey'.  
She insisted, "You are Petrograd-born."  
"And if you are telling the truth, you are going to be caught, and extinct titles and meaningless membership in the once-glittering Russian nobility will certainly not prove enough to save you."  
She drew her chin in for a moment, as though he had slapped her--it was clearly not the response from him she had expected.  
"However," he went on, "you may assure yourself you have done a very admirable job. You may tell your handlers I have said so. And that I thank them for the gift of the hairpin, as it may yet come in handy to me." He took it in his teeth and hid it between his cheek and lower gum.  
"You will see, Aliosha," she used the informal version of the name, though he had not given her leave to do so. "They--someone--will come, as I have said. I would not lie--even for these German beasts--to the son of Prince Igor Fomovich."  
Carter's gaze intensified as he looked at her a brief instant longer before she shut the door. Her doing of it was whisper-quiet, and he was alone again, with the knots in the wood, invisible in the dark, yet etched into the backs of his eyelids at this point.  
How could this woman have known his father's saying? Had he, himself, broken without recalling it? Was there perhaps some new drug the Germans had perfected for making a man's lips loose, and leaving him with no memory of it? Or was he simply to trust her, this Duchess Anya, her family, it would seem, not having escaped the country in time, and enduring what persecution came next at the hands of their countrymen only to now have further hardship and brutality inflicted on them by these German animals?  
Was he to put his trust in her, accept her sincerity?  
In the end, some hours later in his examination of his eventful night, Carter found he was left with this: a hairpin is a hairpin is a hairpin, and it matters not how one comes by it, nor how one is expected to use it. He controlled the hairpin, now, he possessed the hairpin. It would do his bidding. It could not have looked more of a key to him if it had been presented with a ribbon on it by the mayor of New York City following a tickertape parade.


	6. Who's Got the Last Laugh Now?

**Channel Island of Guernsey - Nighten Estate -** It was Thursday, 4:45 a.m., and so, he must be late.  
Not simply fashionably late. No, Robert Oxley was well-acquainted with that. No, too late. Marion was already asleep, tucked into her bed. Mind you, he wasn't lurking about, looking for another wash of his back, nor, surprisingly, anything similarly intimate. Only, Marion.  
Today, Thursday the fourteenth, was Gisbonnhoffer's birthday. It was the day Marion was set to travel to Alderney on Dick Giddons' boat and get herself kidnapped as part of his, Robin's, less-than-brilliant "the best I could do" plan. He had wanted to have a chat. Or spat. Whatever. He was not always particular when it came to Marion. Never had been.  
"Sleep, Marion, sleep," he told her, as in the old nursery rhyme, "thy rest the angels keep."  
He was not able to immediately settle himself, and so he took a moment to wander about the room, not unlike he had two nights prior as he waited for her to return from the Nightwatch. That night he had been overwhelmed with the desire to nick something of hers, a scarf, perhaps, as a knight of old might have of his lady-fair's. But in the end his practical side recalled to him that as much as his heart might be warmed by such a token (even were it taken instead of bestowed), he could risk nothing about his person or among his kit that could be traced back to Marion. The stakes of their two lives were far too high.  
Nonetheless, tonight he poked about in her armoire, enjoying the smell of her on her clothing: something chicly Parisian, mixing (in a way that no doubt surprised the elegantly expensive scent) with grass and earth and--no getting around it--stables.   
Clink. Clink. His hand ran into something unexpected, his large military-issued wristwatch colliding with glass bottlenecks. His heart fell a bit at the sight of it, this poorly stashed stash. He could not think she had learned such poor concealment from any former American bootleggers she might have struck up acquaintances with. This stash was meant to be accessible, not a single bottle among them still full. He quit looking at the liquor and wandered into the bathroom, leaving the door open behind him. Chuckle. Leave it to Lady Nighten (the former) to furnish her vacation home elaborately enough to install matched bidets in the en suite baths, the simple existence of multiple waterclosets (or, even, running water at all) in a rarely-used country house not extraordinary enough.  
He rummaged in the medicine cabinet until he located Marion's toothbrush and toothpowder, and gave not a second thought to using it to brush his teeth until they shone, and his gums puffed with the elbow grease he had applied to the task. He ran a happy tongue across his teeth, reviewing his work in the over-sink mirror.  
He turned on the taps and leaned over into the sink and the steamy heat as he lathered his face for the washing.  
Some nine weeks ago Marion had asked him to stay away. To forget that he had found her, to abandon her to the occupying enemy. Told him that she hoped he never loved a person enough to have to make certain hard choices on their behalf, or live with a person so loved who had already made such choices for themselves.  
He had told her he did not quite know this her. But he had always been a good liar. It was, Robin thought, what she needed him to say in that moment. That she was somehow transfiggered by the choices and dead-ends life had slung at her. That they were strangers, she said, and that to go on she had to forget that night. That dance.  
And yet, she had danced very similarly to a girl he had known quite intimately before the war. And her lips, though long unsaluted by him yet knew how to match the shape of his own. She was Marion. Her mind still worked like Marion's, her words--her speeches--were still Marion's. Her need to feel safe and valued--listened-to--before succumbing to being charmed, to being reminded of being adored, still Marion's. It was only that her circumstances had so drastically shifted.   
"For better or for worse," he thought to himself on the vows they had never had a chance to say aloud, "in sickness and in health, for as long as we both shall live."   
He did not begrudge her one moment of action (improper or not) taken while she understood him dead. Had she even married another in his stead he could not have brought himself to castigate her for it. Mourn over it? Yes. Spiral into black despair over it? Certainly. But blame her for unwittingly destroying his heart? No.  
He had, after all, agreed to abandon her. Not with signing up, surely, but when no word came, no contact or response on her part arrived, no diplomatic missives received to end their row, to mend their fissure, he had begun to believe she did not care, that perhaps it was his own love of her that had blinded him, tricked him into believing she was as much for them as was he.  
And then the plane crash, and the pressure from HQ to agree to the cover-up and new orders. Six men without much connection in the world. None with more than a single living parent among them. None with responsibilities, save Royston, to anyone beyond themselves. And Royston, a career sailor, already away from his wife for lengthy stretches at a time. She would hardly notice him gone.  
Robin had turned his face away from Marion (believing it at her wish) when she left for America. And once the smoke from their battle had cleared, he had regretted it everyday thereafter, yet too proudly to pursue her across an ocean. And so she remained abandoned, alone.   
Nothing she said to him now, here, could convince him to behave so again.  
He snorted lightly to himself. After all, look at what a pickle she had gotten herself into without him. Not that it was in the least bit funny. But perhaps the notion that had he been around, the worm might have turned a bit differently--perhaps that was funny. Pompous, even. To encounter such hubris in one himself outlawed, on the run, more known for blowing things up at this point than rescuing people, than teaching people how to navigate the circumstances and situation they had found themselves in July of '40.  
He had tacitly not stayed away from Marion for the past nine weeks and some, though she was doubtless none the wiser for his occasional personal surveillance of her.  
On market days he made it a point to be lurking nearby the stalls she frequented at St. Peter Port. And he found, he claimed to his men, that the stacks at the city library (what was left of it) proved quite a good place to hold clandestine meetings with other partisans. After all (he did not say this to his men), Marion was a great and frequent patron of that still-standing-after-the-shelling-public building, and anytime he was there he might get lucky and glimpse her, less afar off than by chance when on his bicycle among the capitol city's traffic.  
He did so love to glimpse her. To study on her features as one might have on an entry in Baedeker, long anticipating the sight of the sculpture or architectural marvel in person. And wonder in awe at the gifted Artist who had produced such perfection.  
He left the bathroom and seated himself, uninvited by his hostess who had not the good manners to even wake from her slumber. He leaned forward, elbows to his knees, to better see her by the dim nightlight he had turned on. He reached out. He could not have helped it any more than a child could have avoided reaching for candy on display in a shop. He feather-lightly stroked his fingertips along her un-bound dark hair.

* * *

 

**England - 1937 - Kirk Leaves, the Country Estate of Earl Huntingdon - the barns -** The hour was unthinkable, insofar as a time to find oneself occupied in a barn, and not at a hot gaming table or dance floor or seated in a small and exclusive nightclub with something quite bubbly in stemmed crystal. Certainly none of his London mates would believe it. Would believe any of it, he and Lady Marion Nighten, even had he kissed and told (which, they had all gone on record recently to scold him: they could not understand why he had not).  
Marion turned back toward him from where she reassessed the mare's progressing labor. She smiled.  
Absolute arrows shot through his country coat and into his heart. From where he leaned against the stall's railing, he grinned back.  
"You can go inside and sleep," she told him for the third time. "I will not think the less of you."  
"I have no intention of leaving this spot until you have your foal."  
"My foal? You make it sound like I am the one giving birth."  
"I am not entirely convinced you are not."  
"It is a good mating..."  
"Yes, I know. Marion."  
"Yes?"  
"Come sit with us."  
"Just now?"  
"Yes," Robin responded, "even I, who know so far less of horses, may tell you it is several hours yet before you will be blessed with a new arrival. Sit. I have had them make up some tea." He indicated the Thermos with his booted toe.  
Marion moved toward him, her hand clearly disinclined to depart from the back of the mare.  
"You mustn't worry her to death," Robin advised her. "She knows her job better than either of us. It is, after all, Cordelia Anne's fifth labor, all successful deliveries to this point."  
Marion accepted the metal lid cup and drank.  
Robin dropped himself to the straw-strewn floor of hard-packed earth and maneuvered his hands to get her to come with him. He found a way to lean his back half against the boards, half against a straw bale. Marion, who had consented to sitting, found herself and her cuppa within his open legs, her back to his chest and his arms winding about her, as if intent upon securing her in this spot.  
"I am glad your father has agree to part with the foal."  
"I seem to recall that Lord Nighten made quite a ridiculous offer for the unborn. Seems his spoiled rotten daughter--terrible tyke, no doubt--simply had to have it, or she would throw a fit."  
Marion jerked her shoulder back into him in a move that telegraphed annoyance at his playacting, but had no heft behind it with which to truly injure him.  
"Marion," he said, his voice pitching lower as his lips were quite close to her ear. "The Earl is away," (she knew this), "after this blessed event we might...easily choose to pursue an unprecedented event of our own, back at the manor, or," he shrugged, "here, if you would prefer." He felt her breath catch with his salacious proposition.  
She set the now-empty Thermos lid cup down among the straw and turned her head half-way toward his, kissing him into relaxing his arms enough that she might come all the way 'round. "Robin Goodfellow," she told him, kisses coming in between her words, "I," kiss, "should very much like," l-o-o-onger kiss, "to accept your offer," kiss. She pulled her face abruptly away from his, ensuring they were eye-to-eye, "but I say this not because of propriety, nor even on moral grounds: I am not getting up once I lay down. I know myself, I know my heart, and it would know no happiness in stolen moments of 'playing house'. My heart was not made for such...practicing."  
"No matter how earth-shattering?" he asked, his eyes sparking at the gaze of hers. "How inconceivably magnificent such moments might prove?"  
"...and so I must refuse." She kissed him again, to the point that if he had not known her so well (far better than any girl he had ever kissed to-date), he might have thought her an incomparable tease, a cruel flirt, for parts of him ached that had nothing to do with the hard-packed floor his bum rested on. But he knew her well-enough to know that the kiss was meant to salve the rejection, though in her innocence of such matters she likely had little understanding that to a man such palliative medicine rather worked the opposite.  
He kissed her back, but briefly, attempting to reposition his hips at a less provocative angle, and agreed to re-shelve his suggestion for another time. "Come then, at least sit by me. For I am for a nap. And sleep, no doubt, proves sweeter in your embrace."  
She began humming the tune of a song from Shall We Dance, the newest Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire film. He knew she wouldn't take her eyes off the mare, but twelve feet away. He knew he was far from the forefront of her mind in this instance. As she let him fold her again into his arms, her head resting back onto his shoulder, her arms wrapping about his neck, he could not likely have been any happier.

* * *

**Present - Marion's Guernsey bedroom -** With the memory, Robin lightly sang to himself the lyrics to that Gershwin she had hummed to him that night some lifetime ago, "They all laughed at Christopher Columbus/When he said the world was round/They all laughed when Edison recorded sound/They laughed at me, wanting you/Said I was reaching for the moon/They all said we never would be happy..."

* * *

**France - late Spring 1937 -** "But ho, ho, ho/Who's got the last laugh now?"   
"She will have found it now," Robin said to his father, in unintentional non-sequitur, so deeply enamored with his own thoughts at the moment, and their happy focus of Marion.  
"Eh?" the Earl asked from behind his paper on the train to Paris. They had their compartment to themselves for the moment.  
"I have left word, asking her to marry me."  
"What, Tish again?" his father asked, not even bothering to lower the newsprint pages to look his son in the eye, of so little interest his son's vacillating love life and without-a-care ways had become to him.  
"Murder, Father!" Robin exclaimed. "Tish is--Tish was--ages, a lifetime, an aeon, an epiphany ago."  
The Earl sighed, closing his newspaper and folding it into his lap. "Dash it all, Robin, I read not enough of the society pages to keep abreast on your present paramours. Who, then, is it to be this time?" But wait. Something seemed to sift to the front of the Earl's mind, away from where he had been only a moment ago contemplating the bond market, and the unsettling international situation on the Continent. "Did you say 'marry'?" This was, then, rather something more than simply a new pretty face. Certainly it would potentially prove so to his pocketbook where his son's allowance was concerned. After all, he could not conceive any engagement of Robin's going beyond just that: engagement. Until the idea lost its shine for his son.  
"Yes, Sir. I have left word with Marion Nighten, that we--rather, I--shall be returning from our holiday to have words with Sir Edward, and offer her a ring."  
"Marion Nighten?"  
"Well, don't blow your wig or anything, Father." Robin studied his father's expression. "You don't seem a bit pleased. You do not approve?"  
"Approve? Hardly. Marion Nighten. You may note that I quite strongly disapprove."  
"I cannot think of on what grounds."  
"Grounds? That she is a damn sight too good for you. That she has not enough of Lady Nighten's silly ways, and far too much of her father in her."  
"But you have always held Sir Edward in high regard, have you not?"  
"The utmost, certainly. But he is a man, a lord, and has a seat in Parliament; his mind and passions well-suited to it. Marion is a girl--a woman--bright, promising, with the strength of her convictions and the intelligence to get them heard. And you tell me now that there is enough possibility that she might accept my foolish, foppish, fickle son as her husband that you have laid the groundwork for asking her? (For I cannot think even you would have gone so far down this path if you knew your offer hopeless of being accepted.) You will be the ruin of her. And in a short while you will grow to resent and despise her ways. So absolutely I am resolute in my disapproval."  
"You like her," he almost laughed aloud at his father's thinly veiled (yet somewhat dispassionate) outrage. "You disapprove on the grounds that you like her."  
"Wherever there is a quick mind, an informed intellect, and an admirable desire to enlarge one's sphere of influence, how could I not? Of course I like her." The Earl went on, suggesting other less-permanent outlets for his son's newest passion. "Have her to tea, bring her to supper--take her to one of your ridiculous nightclubs--if she will go with you--but do not, I counsel you--do not treat her like one of your other London girls."  
"No, Father," Robin pledged, indulgent humor playing around the corners of his eyes, though the Earl had gone back to his paper, "I have absolutely no intention of doing so."  
"They laughed at me, wanting you/Said I was reaching for the moon/They all said we never would be happy..."

* * *

**London's West End - late Spring 1937 - Mayfair -** Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house - (Earlier that same morning that Robin and his father are on the train to Paris.)   
It was unusual that Marion was up so early. Certainly she was not sure what had called her at this hour to forsake her bed. There would be nothing truly exciting in the city for several weeks. Robin and the Earl were off to a Spring holiday in France, as was their custom.  
She, herself, was planning an escape to the country later in the week to see how Saracen's Beau was coming along. It was meant (to appease her mother) to be only a short trip away from London and town, but Marion had the distinct feeling that she was going to scheme to get herself more time, despite Lady Nighten's assured objections to such an idea, but, better to ask forgiveness than permission in such matters, Marion had long ago learned.  
Since Robin had been calling regularly at the town house, Lady Nighten could not have been more keen on her daughter (her sometimes bookish, leaning-toward intellectual daughter), and her daughter's new beau, seen by many as the catch of all London. Marion knew her mother well enough to tolerate the new attentions (and heavens knew Robin was charming enough for fifteen beaux when he wanted to be), but she found she had little desire in Robin's absence to venture into society parties and parade about as the (seen as) less-charming half of a talked-about couple.  
The country, then, it would be.  
She nipped into the study on her way down to the kitchens to see if her nibbles from the night before had yet been removed. Sadly, they had. As she turned to go, the tall tree that was so well-framed by the study's eleven-foot windows caught her eye, or rather, something in it, very, very far up, perhaps ten-foot up the window glass, did.  
The robin's nest she and Robin had been speculating on but a week ago seemed to have gained a new occupant, a...an interesting 'something'.  
She strained and stretched and even brought the rolling library ladder as close to that window as it might go to get a better look.  
What little she could see did not satisfy her. She needed to get closer. But how? She forsook the study and flew up to the third floor like her heels were winged. In her bedroom she flung open the sash on her window (on the same side of the house as the tree in view of the study) and without allowing herself a second thought she climbed out on one of its sturdier branches and to its strong trunk, trying to tell herself it was far too early for anyone in Mayfair to be watching the trees at a third-story level, and that the mature trees' own branches shielded her well-enough from any view but the most probing.  
She shimmied down to the branch in question, just within sight of the study, for a moment enjoying this new view of one of her favorite places, like looking into a shadowbox room, or a playhouse; her father's desk, the leather arm chairs, the chess set, the way the early morning light glinted off the crystal decanters of port and scotch.  
And Clem. Clem! Ah, her brain told her to startle. There was Clem, walking into the study. She immediately grabbed for the nest's contents before she had taken time to test its branch for weight-bearing. It snapped.   
She slid and scrambled, unable to use both hands to try and save herself from falling, as one hand held the nest's precious prize.  
She must have made a noise. Clem had gotten the study window open, somehow, the lower third of it all that was made to do so (precisely why she had had to go up two more floors). And somehow he had her before she had scraped and tumbled all the way down the tree and to the ground; his hands full of her (that is, his) dressing gown and some of her hair (ouch).  
He dragged her into the study, where once she got her breath she noticed that she seemed to be shedding bits of branches and early Spring buds onto the carpet.  
"Marion?" her older brother asked, unable to conceal his perplexed amusement. "You twit," he chuckled in delight, "What on earth are you doing?"  
And suddenly her father and mother were also there. But far from delighted, or amused. She must have made a noise as she fell--did she cry out? Or had they only responded to the sounds of her falling down the tree?  
Her mother looked horrified, no doubt cataloging the possible witnesses: servants upstairs and downstairs, deliverymen, anyone on the street, their neighbors.  
Her father spoke, a rumble in his chest, a delicious sound of indignation that added a wonderful color when he was delivering speeches. Less delicious to hear just now. "Marion," he began with the first affront he took note of. "What are you wearing?"  
She looked down to the quite-nice-before-her-tumble set of Clem's silk pajamas and matching dressing gown.  
It was only the anticipation of looking closer at the nest's contents (now in her closed fist) that carried her through the scolding to follow.  
It proved to be a tiny indigo-glass bottle, hardly larger than her thumb, stoppered. Inside was a tight roll of paper. She uncorked the vial and the message fell into her waiting palm. She recognized it as a revision of an old nursery rhyme. It read, "There came to your window this morning in Spring/A sweet little Robin, came to hear you sing; The tune that you sang it was prettier by far/Than any he'd heard on flute or guitar. His wings he was spreading to soar far away/Then resting a moment seemed sweetly to say--Oh happy, how happy the world seems to me/Awake, little girl, and be happy with me!"   
Below this was written, "In my absence I leave you this assignment: Practice saying, 'yes'. And try to get Sir Edward to join in the lesson as well. When I return, upon your 'yes' I mean to speak with him in an effort to also collect his. Marion, you may be sure of me. You always may be sure of me. -Robin" The 'always' was underlined four times.  
She was amazed to note how sure she did, in fact, feel.

* * *

**Present -** From his place in the overstuffed chair Robin took a last moment to look at Marion as she slept. He would not wake her, but he had overstayed, and was needed elsewhere.   
He had never joined the Nighten family on their holidays here, had possessed little knowledge of (or interest in) these islands before becoming stranded among them six months ago. He did not know (rather did not recall) enough higher mathematics to calculate the statistics of his becoming trapped here, just as Marion was trapped; the likelihood that two people once so intimately connected and then separated by an ocean might find themselves now, in this uncertain time of war and conflict sequestered within an ocean, together, reunited at last.  
Something in the Universe had brought him here. Brought him back to her, or her back to him, some arcane magnetism that confounded logic and possibility and the modern compass. He would not ignore that.  
He would never stay away.


	7. A troubled soul

**Alderney - October 14th - Camps - Morning Roll call -** "What is this you're giving me, Diefortner?" Kommandant Vaiser asked, clearly irritated at being handed papers on his way outside to survey his tiny kingdom and its wretched, condemned inhabitants.  
"It is a message, recently come over the wire for Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer. It was in this morning's satchel."  
"Aaaaaaand..." Vaiser's impatience was mounting.  
"It appears to be a personal message sent from home and received by one of our ships off the coast..."  
"Aaaaaaand..." Vaiser flashed a looked of annoyance to his adjutant.  
"And...I thought you might wish to offer it to him when you see him."  
"Do I look a letter-carrier to you, Diefortner? Do I wear a postman's insignia? Do you think I possibly give a rat's fart," Vaiser began to tear into the private message with his hands while gnashing his teeth in displeasure, "that Herr Geis is getting fan mail sent to him direct from the Fatherland? I have people to oppress, prisoners to exterminate and an island to--" He stopped. "Ooo," Vaiser cooed, his tone turning into something more of a contented (if curious) purr. His eyes flicked up to Diefortner's. "Gisbonnhoffer is not to be informed of this message--yet. Find and bring me his personnel file--personally. Oh, and be sure to wish him a 'happy birthday'." The Kommandant's tongue flicked out, rather serpent-like. "It is his birthday, did you know?"  
The adjutant vehemently shook his head, 'no' from side to side.  
"He ages another year, and I think," Vaiser tapped the opened message against his own be-medaled chest, being sure not to show its contents, "yes, I do rather think, I am growing to like him better every day."  
As was his way when he was in a good mood, he included his adjutant in his plans. "Now let us go, we two, and find some people to persecute! What do you say," he appeared to suggest (though anything he said was always, in actuality, a demand) hard labor for anyone still wearing socks?" He rubbed his hands together as Diefortner held open the door for him on the side of the office that led closest to the barracks, and the seemingly endless lines of prisoners, like grey geese queuing in formation to migrate, leeched now even of their grayness. They had been standing so, at threat of their jailers for two hours, during which the Kommandant had had a sumptuous breakfast including an eight-egg omelet, followed by a pedicure.  
Diefortner smiled to himself, shrewdly not letting the Kommandant see it. He had made the right choice in bringing the message to Vaiser straightaway, despite the momentary tongue-lashing he'd received. Even a great man needed to surround himself with useful, loyal minions.  
It was his plan to become indispensable as such. The Russky girl, and now this: score two, Diefortner.

* * *

**Channel Island of Sark -** It is a decidedly rural landscape, tractors on the island far outnumber any other vehicle. There has never been much in the way of motor traffic. Farms and livestock dominate the idyllic countryside. The ongoing war and occupation--even the very notions of such--seem impossibly far away, though visible in the distance from the northeast beaches of this isle is Alderney, and four camps created solely for the purpose of suffering and cruelty, conceived in unwarranted hate.  
On Sark it is easy to recall that these islands in the Channel have remained perpetually at peace, undisturbed, uninvaded, for nearly a thousand years. Perhaps that is why when the evacuations began in June of 1940 prior to the Germans landing, the population of Sark chose, overwhelmingly, to stay put.  
Like Stephen La Salle. Blind La Salle as he was called often as not, though not quite as blind as the world, and those on the islands, might have believed.  
Certainly he could hardly see a foot in front of his own face with any clarity, and had not been able to read printed text in over ten years. His only personal reading was in the treasured Braille Bible he owned, a parting gift from his tiny Brechou Island parish upon his early retirement as rector at the final shortfall of his sight.  
But he could see with his ears, could learn more about a person in mere moments with them than those sighted might in days or months. He could see with some inner eye that two decades of ministering to his parish had birthed, some understanding of the world's troubles; large and smallish, grand or (thought) inconsequential.  
And he could farm like no other. He knew his way well enough around his own barns and outbuildings, his own animals, that were it not for the rare inconvenience of a cow gone missing far afield, or the possibility of other similar mishaps beyond his scope, he likely could have gotten by entirely on his own. As it was, he employed and boarded a hired man.  
Yet, this morning, (though his eyes could not let him see it) he seemed to be entertaining not only that one man, but more than several of his (proving quite rowdy) brothers.  
The stovetop was still warm with the makings of the meal, the kettle itself barely off the boil. And on an October morning such as this, the heat from the cast iron range was plenty welcome by all present.  
"Dick," Blind Stephen La Salle called into the cacophony of newly-familiar voices at his kitchen table, the meal close to finished, elbows now denting the oil cloth, "it is this morning you go, yes? Ferrying the lady to Alderney?"  
"Aye, yes Stephen," the young man at the opposite end of the table agreed.  
Bread on the cutting board was nearly gone, crumbs from the many cuttings dappling its surface, the butter pot still held someone's forgotten knife, and the last of Louise's best-canned jam stood almost cleaned out of the last jar. Down a long line of mis-matched cups (rarely had so many been fed here) and noisy saucers, another one of the men spoke up.  
"I do not mean to talk you out of helping, Dick, certainly, but why do you do it? Why take such a great risk on a stranger's behalf?" asked the ever-inquisitive Mitch Bonchurch, to the audible groan of one Iain Johnson.  
The young lad known as Dick Giddons spoke to the men with whom he shared Stephen's table, "Got a brother in America. And wot if it were 'im they got?"  
"Here, here," agreed Royston, perhaps sounding a bit more of a man cheering another on late at night in a game of pub darts than at a hearty farmer's breakfast of six a.m., and a cup of clotted cream in his hand rather than a salutatory pint.  
Stephen felt the air move as the contemplative Wills Reddy, sitting next to him, nodded his head in assent to Dick's motivation. "Got a brother. He's a flier, too. Dunno where he's stationed." The air moved again as he shrugged. "Dunno if he's still alive."  
Several matches were struck off the stove to light after-meal smokes.  
"I got bruvva, too," spoke up Allen Dale, perhaps the most loquacious of the group, certainly by turns the most aggressively entertaining.  
"What?" asked Iain Johnson, the one they called John, in disbelief.  
"I did not think," decried Bonchurch, "we were allowed more than a single living relative at most among any of us," Dale's most nit-picking (and often most-debunked) critic protested.   
Stephen supposed he meant to reference this particular espionage unit's initial requirements for joining.  
"Well," Dale spoke on, slyly, as was often his way. "He's not really livin', technically. And he's but a half-brother. Tom Thatcher, His Majesty's prisoner."   
No doubt at the questioning looks of the other men about the table, he went on to elaborate.  
"Extortion or whatnot. Some scheme or other. Never hurt anyone...that I know. Twelve year sentence."  
In the kerfuffle of questions all 'round that followed, Stephen turned to the (oddly in such an over-populated room, lone) man at his right, silent of tongue, and moving not at all through the lively discussion. "And you, Robin, what think you of the subject of brothers?"  
Oxley answered. "I think you all are my brothers. For I have known no others, and wished no others."   
It was a rousing mini-speech, worthy of toasting at the end, and the men certainly crowed to hear it, but it was delivered without true conviction, and lacked energy and zeal behind it.  
"You are a troubled soul today, Robin," Stephen told him privately in low tones as the others continued to carry on. "That is not at all what you are thinking."  
"Is it not?" Robin said, a slight spark of challenge, like a twinkle of light, almost, in his voice.  
Stephen kept his voice pitched low, for Robin alone. "You are thinking that had you married her you would now already have a child. Perhaps two...perhaps, brothers."  
"And you can tell all that from but two sentences said?"  
"And from the way you shy away from us after being to see her, even though you sit among us; and the slope of your shoulders just now--"  
"The slope of my shoulders?" Oxley's tone was incredulous.  
"And the fact that Mitch cannot keep one word of what he knows to himself..."  
"Mitch," Robin spoke the word like an exhale of pent-up air in his lungs, and Stephen could see the smile he cracked in the smell of the jam on his exhaled breath.  
"Have you a wife, Stephen?" Oxley, the leader of this gang asked him, his voice also toned for a private conversation.  
"We are separated," Stephen responded.  
"Ah, I did not know. I apologize for my--"  
"No. Separated. Louise evacuated. We thought it best. You see, her grandmother was Jewish."  
There was a pull of curiosity in the corners of Robin's voice. "And you stayed?"  
"There were many turned away, and too few boats. I would not have wished to put myself forward over another woman, or a child, or a person of Jewish descent. And," Stephen did not wish to let himself off the hook, "I miscalculated. I did not think what has come to pass would truly come to pass."  
"Do you hear from her? Is there any way to know, to be sure of her safety?"  
Stephen knew the younger man was thinking less of himself and Louise, than of his own quandary of sending his love, the Lady Marion, on a mission to the camps this day. His chest rumbled a bit at the mild chuckle he gave to the notion of receiving mail on Sark. "The Germans have little interest in delivering Red Cross messages on the big islands, much less out here."  
The younger Briton began to put the pieces together, "So it has been..."  
"Coming up on four years. I still find that I keep to my side of the bed. That is an encouraging sign, yes?" He felt his lips pulling into a half-smile. "That I still know myself to be married? That I still hope for her return?" Before the other man could answer him, he stood, the act of which pushed back his chair noisily on the floorboards, and all conversation among the other men came to an end at this, the rising of their host.  
"Come," said Blind Stephen La Salle, to those men gathered at his table, eating of the fruits of his labor, men for the moment safe and rested from a rare night not on the run. "As you know, I do not intend on joining your mission, but I may be of some assistance...in praying for it."  
As the retired rector stood to offer a blessing and a prayer for safety in this act of saving a life and subverting their occupiers, he could see how the men present would react. Royston's head would be bowed so low as to almost be uncomfortable. Mitch's brow would be furrowed in deep reverence. John would mouth his own prayer along with Stephen. Wills and Dick would respectfully echo his 'amen' when through, Allen Dale would be sneaking little glimpses throughout to check and see what the others were really up to, and Robin, here beside him, Robin would not hear the exact words he would say, would not be able to recall the gist of the blessing, but would today most keenly feel the sentiment, the need behind the language spoken.  
"Our Father, we ask Your blessing this day on those taking risks, on those making the decisions, and unto those whose task it is but to wait and see. We ask for Your will in all things, and Your wisdom in our every action. We ask for the blinding of Your enemies to what we seek to do, and Your almighty confounding of their plots, large and small."  
Blind La Salle, his prayer not over, moved to grip each of Robert Oxley's rawboned shoulders, already knowing they were quite heavily weighed down that day, gripped them like a laying-on of hands, and continued, now silently (as was often his way before giving the 'amen') to pray for each man present, beginning and ending with Oxley.  
"And we ask, if it be in Your will for us, to live long enough to see the day our islands, these in the Channel, and the isle of all Britain--Ireland included--are again free of this terror. Amen."  
And for all that Blind La Salle could not, technically, see, he needed no one present to tell him that it was yet a good while after his own prayer was completed, his 'amen' said, before Robert Oxley raised his own head and echoed the same concluding word.


	8. Marion's Arrival/Prison Break

**English Channel waters - between Guernsey and Alderney -** Marion tried not to stare too much at Dick Giddons as he piloted the boat, this man she was to have bribed (in their cover story) in order to ferry her to Alderney, the German stronghold and location of the enemy's labor/prison/death camps. She did find it hard to reconcile the notion that such a still-awkward and boyish young man had inspired her trust (had she, indeed, chosen him herself) to the point that she would have selected him and his craft for such a perilous journey. He was young (easily seen) and more than a little frightened already (nearly as easily seen).  
She did not think it likely he had ever done such a thing before; risked so much, nor defied authority in any way. He was a fish-and-farm hand. From Sark, he had said. Sark's country simplicity she knew, with its single government school, and classes that did not reach beyond age fifteen.  
They were passing the self-same island presently; she could see it on their starboard side, knew it well enough to recall its natural beauty, the green and wooded valleys, the sheep grazing pastorally atop its 300-foot-high cliffs, breathtakingly perpendicular to the sea.   
Several porpoises were just now frolicking about their bow, others racing alongside them in the spray. She found herself resenting the fact that she could not better enjoy this trip on the water. She could not even fully recall the last time she had been out on the salt sea without a German escort of a nearby vessel or soldiers actually sharing the boat.  
A voice in her head laughed. You long for freedom, it taunted her, even as you prepare to fake your own bondage--your own kidnapping. Well, she had found such preparations perplexing. In the October weather she would have much preferred a warm pair of woolen trouser pants, perhaps a sturdy boot and her herringbone coat, her hair in a long English braid down her back. Not entirely fashionable nor aggressively feminine, but warmer and more comfortable. Practical, even.  
But she had known she could risk no visible shortcomings as she found and greeted Geis. Could take no chance on leaving any possible source of potential titillation unexploited. She could not entirely depend upon her own acting prowess (dampened by the cold unpleasantness of being near him) to carry the day to convince him she was so very desperate to see him. So as far as costume went, she had chosen wisely for the con, and unwisely for the weather.   
She was hatless, only a headscarf tied under her chin to shield her hair in its stylish side rolls and back rolled-bun, embellished by her three best tortoise shell combs. Her legs were displayed to their best effect in a pair of new nylons straight from Paris, a gift from Geis; and her flawlessly painted toes were encased in a daring pair of apple-green leather peek-a-boo pumps, soles not even yet nicked from wear.   
The wrap dress she wore was brightly colored, its florid geometric pattern seeming to speak to a certain wildness, an abandon, in its wearer, for all that its cut was entirely modest. Yet, it was the sort of dress a girl might wear when she wanted not only to be noticed, but to be...discovered. Shiny, impossible-to-miss spangles of a matching necklace, earrings, and a chunky bracelet finished out the theme of eye-catching, show-stopping, traffic-snarling va-va-va-voom siren. And the entire package was sealed with a perfectly applied, wantonly red-as-ruby lipstick.  
Unfortunately, in this moment, the sea air all about her, the fabric of the dress was proving thinner, even, than she had recalled, and having talked herself out of a coat or sweater (she did not want to have to remove anything when Geis first saw her that might delay his appreciation of the entire effect), she was cold, and coming on grouchy.   
She felt like Esther in the Bible story, on her way to see the King to try and petition for the saving of her people. But the King had not requested Esther, and if he did not take kindly to her interrupting him, could order her killed on the spot. Marion did not doubt that Esther, too, had taken fastidious and exquisite care in her toiletry running up to that auspicious meeting, little care given to issues of personal comfort or weather-worthiness of her attire.  
As for herself? She was ready to be there, and be gone.

* * *

 

**Alderney - Outside Barracks Headquarters -** Allen Dale was preparing to strike a match and light a smoke. He looked down for a moment to the Kommandant's car's rubber tire, thought better of it, and struck off the leather sole of his left shoe. He held the match up to the snipe between his lips, cupping the light in his hand against the heightening wind, careful not to let the flame flare and catch his mustache and goatee afire as well.  
"Mr. Dale," he heard, in a woman's voice. "Chauffeur?"   
Her voice was always quiet, always undersold. He had wondered more than once if it were so in her normal life, or rather, her prior life. Life before this camp, this place, this imprisonment. For all that the woman Anya seemed to move freely about the area of barracks headquarters, he knew her, at her own admission, to be a prisoner here.  
But still, not much like the other prisoners. She had a sleeping room in among the offices, ate what the officers were served (though not with them), and was allowed to dress much like any other attractive woman out among the rest of the free (he snorted a bit at that) world. And she was always very clean, with a bit of scent on, too. If you didn't look at it too closely you might come away thinking these German officers very genteel toward her. Might come away remembering things about her no man on a military mission had any business thinking about in regards to a contact.  
"Hello, there, Annie," he said, his accent deconstructing the Russian of her name.   
To any observer's eyes they were simply two people employed by the Germans having an inconsequential chat, a secretary and a driver.  
She began to speak, relating to him as quickly as possible her face-to-face encounter with the flier now being kept in the Lieutenant's office closet.  
"It's good, your English," Allen complimented her, careful to buoy her spirits with remarks about her skill, rather than personal comments, such as how flattering the dress she wore today was against her skin. He had gotten into trouble with that before. He could see in her eyes when she looked at him that she could be trouble for him, could easily fall, sinking hip-deep into the cult of Allen Dale, dangerously charming undercover spy and renown ladies' man. And he didn’t really need any complications like that between them. Nor wish to have to further disappoint a woman whose life was already bleak beyond measure. She was proving far too valuable an asset to risk in any such a way.  
Nonetheless, she took on a glow at his kind word and deferential demeanor.  
"So you gave 'im the hairpin, like I done told you?"  
"Yes. The smaller one. He put it in his mouth."  
"Good. Good. Let's hope he proves himself a real corker and knows when best to use it. Now, get yer Gypsy boy to leave the closet's outside latch undone, and we'll hope no one notes it. After that, it's all on Lady Marion."  
Anya went pale at his mention of the name, the first time she had been let in on the exact 'who' of Robin's 'best I could do' plan.  
"Marion?" she asked. "The woman's name is Marion? I do not know...I do not think..." she muttered and stuttered along for a moment in what he assumed was Russian before she returned to English. "It is not safe for her here."  
"Naw," Dale tried to calm what he took to be a case of nerves. "Don't you worry. Your part's done, Annie. It'll all come 'round right. Best thing you and I can do is get out of the way." To try and cheer her further, he extended his nearly-through cigarette to her, but she politely declined it.  
Smart, too, he thought to himself, seeing how the shadows moved behind the window in an office that faced them and the approach to the HQ and nearby guard towers. Would do her no good to have her captors thinking they shared anything more than the occasional (and rare) two-minute chat.   
He let the still-smoking butt of the snipe fall onto the muddy ground at his feet as she walked away, back to her clerical prison, her hair always down, lengths of it catching in the on-again off-again wind, swirling it about her like tendrils of smoke, lifting ends of it as though it wished to be liberated from the gravity that held it here, wished to break with such governance as the wind must have done long ago time before memory; free, unchained, its caprice unbound to any will but its own.  
Allen Dale pulled himself out of the moment and went to stand beside the car's backseat door. The Kommandant would be out at any time, ready to travel on to the next camp, as it was a review day.

* * *

 

**Inside Barracks Headquarters - Gisbonnhoffer's office -** Kommandant Vaiser looked out the window to his waiting car below. The Russky girl and his islander chauffeur were speaking briefly.  
"Best keep an eye on that," he warned Gisbonnhoffer.  
"What's that?"  
"My man, and your girl, of course."  
"My girl?"  
"The secretary."  
"Oh. Her."  
"One must run a tight ship, Lieutenant."  
"Certainly, Sir. Which is why she is allowed out of the office for only five minutes consecutively."  
"Oh, good. Very good. Quite good." Vaiser said absently, his mind in its way already on to deliciously imagining the girl (who, as Diefortner had informed him, was, indeed, quite pretty enough) finding herself breathlessly, unexpectedly in the grip of his raffish chauffeur; the mustachioed islander opening the backseat door and torridly placing her into the car, and in short order, himself as well. Yes, oh yes, quite good. He let out a half-audible grunt. Which would leave him here, spying on them from the office window with nothing but a glimpse of his chauffeur's moving backside. Ooo. Yes. Vaiser clapped the tips of his two forefingers together in soundless applause. Even better.

* * *

 

**Inside Barracks Headquarters - Gisbonnhoffer's office - the closet -** As usual the Gypsy boy had come, his large eyes as always a little bit fearful, a little bit distrustful, and all rapt intensity.   
In a voice too quiet to even be counted a whisper, he spoke, saying that he would not latch the door properly.  
And so, thought Carter, the new game is afoot. The girl--the Russian, and now the Gypsy. He half-expected Santa Claus to make an appearance. No, perhaps the Easter Bunny.  
He did not stir at the Gypsy boy's departure, not to check and see if the door was, indeed, unlatched and able to be opened from the inside, nor to begin picking the lock on his manacles. If he was to be a pawn, a lab rat in these Germans' experiment, he would at least choose his own time to attempt an escape. It seemed about the only thing over which he had much (if any) control.

* * *

 

 

 

**Alderney Harbor and docks -** "Shall I come with you, Lady Marion?" Dick Giddons had asked when she had disembarked at the Alderney harbor.  
"You had best stay here, with your boat," she had counseled him, her voice quiet to avoid being overheard by the German prisoners and soldiers loading and unloading vessels all about them. "When the flier and I return we shall playact at stealing it from you, I think. Until then, surrender it to no one."  
The young man's face continued in its contorted grimace of concern. "But will you be quite safe here, alone, as you make your way to the camp?"  
"I have my papers with me," she tried to assure him, the infrequent-in-his-youth crease of worry about the corner of his eyes unsettling to her. "And I know more than a few of the officers. I shall do fine on my own." She had given him a smile far brighter than she felt.  
She had gone perhaps ten whole steps before she was presented with a young officer who seemed to know her, though she had no recollection of him at all. In short order he had procured a car and seen to it she was driven the distance to the camp where Geis was stationed.  
On the way they encountered a second car on the road, traveling in the opposite direction. It happened so fast that it took her breath away, but in the flash-instant of their passing by one another, she saw Robin's man, Allen Dale, grab the brim of his cap in salutation of her, the lady in the other car. And though she did not see him in the other car's backseat, she knew she had made it past the Kommandant.  
When she got to the rough-hewn wooden building just within the camp's double row of barbed wire fences, she began to feel as though her body was operating on orders wholly independent of herself. She felt hesitant, but her legs powered on, her muscles contracted appropriately, her body exited the car, her voice bid the helpful young officer who had found her this ride to stay put, as Herr Geis would surely wish to thank him for his efforts on her behalf.  
She turned and began to make her way toward the steps, onto the narrow porch and into the offices.  
The door before her burst open.  
"Marion!" It was Gisbonnhoffer. His face, usually pallid in contrast to his dark hair and uniform was positively rosy, strongly flushed at the sight of her. He grabbed her by the elbow and whisked her through the door before she could point out the helpful young officer, or speak any words of her own.   
They were quite suddenly out of the air and into a rather narrow hallway, the bare bulbs hanging above them producing a harsh light. There was a lumber smell yet to the wood, still untreated, un- painted or finished with plaster or lath after all this time.  
"Geis, I," she began, but before she could get out more, explain why she had come, or think a second thought, she was caught up, pressed tightly and possessively in his embrace.  
"Darling, mein liebe," he crooned.   
She could not see it, but his eyes rolled in their sockets like parts of his anatomy risked coming unstuck from where they belonged at the forceful emotion he experienced at the sight of her.   
"Quickly," he encouraged her, still in his arms, to move with him down the hallway and to what (she assumed) was his private office. "The Kommandant has just left, but it is best you are seen by as few here as possible."  
He finally let go his consuming, total hold on her and slipped first into his office, pulling her through the door by her hand, his long arm trailing behind him where it joined with hers. He pulled her about to where the desk stood, putting it to her back while he took up a position only a scant two feet away from her, his back to the office door, which he had closed behind them.  
It was a modest office, of adequate size for perhaps four people to be present within comfortably. There was a chair across from the desk and one behind it, two windows, as it was located at a corner of the building, a slim door (to a closet, she assumed), a wireless on a narrow table for such up against a wall, two filing cabinets, and a nearly-bare bookshelf.  
"How came you here?" he asked, his questions tumbling out of him at the further appraisal of her, his eyes telling her quite undeniably that her toiletry ministrations were not only noticed, but highly--and aphrodisiacally--appreciated. Perhaps, too highly. "You cannot stay, you know that, yes? You are well? Your, uh, your father--he is also well? How have you come all this distance, and the boats so tightly regulated? Were you seen by many? We must--we must get you--" He gasped to catch his breath. "I am glad you came. Oh, so glad. You do not...know--"  
The door behind him scratchily inched open. Marion could not tell who was there, but a fall of long hair slipped through the door just before its owner.  
"Get out," Geis snapped, throwing the order over his shoulder, as nastily as she had ever heard him speak to anyone. "Stay...OUT." The 'out' was like a bark, deep and feral in his throat.  
The door, just as scratchily, shut.  
"Happy birthday," Marion said, though she found she could not quite put the necessary sentiment behind the wish.  
It did not seem to matter. Geis closed up the gap of space between them, in his ardor all but bending her backward over the desk, her bum knocking over an inkwell, the sticky contents of which she shortly began to feel seeping through the skirt of her dress' thin fabric, wicking into her underpinnings, her satin tap pants worn beneath. She tried to protest at the spill, but he proved too forceful of mouth and arms to let her reaction distract him.  
"Ah, Marion," he groaned between kissing her, "you are here, you are here."  
She tried to suppress her natural desire to squirm as he continued with great fervor to fawn over her.  
She was so concentrated (and distracted) by Geis' zealous and all-consuming attentions, she did not notice (and neither did he) when the narrow closet door swung open and a man (or what several weeks ago had once been quite recognizable as a man) shot out from that space like a greased cannonball, and had Gisbonnhoffer's 9mm out of its holster and, quite brutally, suddenly to her neck.  
She expected the man (she assumed, the flier who was to have been expecting her) to speak, to offer some sort of breezy banter, the way she would imagine Robin to cheekily interact with an enemy.   
He said nothing; the only sound in the room his ragged and uneven breathing, the thudding of her heart, and perhaps a sort of negative electricity that seemed to exist like some invisible incendiary between he and Geis.  
Do not hurt him, she had been planning to say, assuming the flier would attempt to shoot Geis, and she would offer herself up in his place, thereby initiating the kidnapping as a sort of 'take me, not him' scenario. But she had no further gotten the 'd' in 'do' out than the flier had viciously torn the swastika armband from Geis' upper biceps and forcibly stuffed it well into her mouth, effectively silencing her. She did not doubt her eyes grew wide at his unexpected action, at the unexpected level of discomfort and even rising panic it inspired, this smothering of her voice, coupled with the inability to fully close her jaws, and the hat trick of the negative effect it had on her ability to breathe.  
She could not see the flier very well. He was behind her now, steering her, the cold insistence of the pistol barrel seeming to be his only contact with her. He was maneuvering her out of the room, down the hall, out of the building.  
She had seen emotion registering in Geis' eye--shock, outrage, and something else, something truly cold: an understanding that this event was taken by him to be a challenge, a duel, perhaps, and her, the spoils. Her, to belong to the victor. She perceived this in him, in her German fiancé, a man who had repeatedly professed his love and admiration, his care of her, and it made her blood run far colder than she had perhaps ever known it could.  
"Stand down," Geis shouted from behind them to the armed guards, the tower guards. "On my order, do nothing!" His voice rang out clear, but slightly shaken.  
They were to the young officer, still standing, at her request, by the car. Without letting up the pressure of the pistol barrel to her neck (and, oh, there was pressure--insistent pressure), the flier used his free hand to disarm the officer. This was done so quickly as to be over in the space of a lightning strike, the kill shot to the officer's head just as swift.   
One second a promising young German officer standing there to meet her and receive thanks for driving her here; the next, parts of his brains, and much of his blood, spattering the window behind where he had stood.  
The flier now had two guns. He prodded her, still via the neck (she had never known before how much a touch on one's neck might direct one's actions) through the splattered passenger door, across the upholstered bench seat and into the driver's spot.  
It was only then that he spoke. "If you do not know how to drive, then you die here, Jerry-lover, for you are no further use to me."  
He was tall enough, his legs long enough, to bring his foot (oddly bare) over to the gas, gunning the engine like a car in the Grand Prix as she manipulated the clutch and the gearshift, and they shot out of the camp, through the now-open barbed-wire gates and onto the road to the docks, as though from a tightly-sprung slingshot.  
She could not wait for the moment they were out of sight and he would be able to lower the pistol from her neck and help her remove the foul gag from her mouth.  
But even as she thought this, all she could see (though she did not take her eyes from navigating the road directly ahead of them) was the young officer, crumpling over and over again into a stiff heap. He was a German. She hated him.  
And yet, she felt something that she had been the means of his death. He was not assigned to be at the camp that day; he had only come to accommodate her, out of politeness, even chivalry, perhaps.   
It was then she noticed her hand. She must have brushed up against the door on her way into the car, for there he was, that officer, some bit of him on her hand, some smidge of brains, blood.   
What, she wondered, did that piece of him account for? Hate? Was that where he had carried it? Cruelty? Or perhaps love of beauty? Memories of his mother? His hopes for the future? A love of Rhineland wines?  
Quickly she had to shift up gears again, the flier taxing the engine, asking for its all. She stole a quick glance sideways, and saw in his face that he knew Geis and the others would have radioed ahead to the docks, immediately dispatched others, and would be coming themselves on the road behind them.  
But she also saw in his eyes that he believed himself entirely alone in this, that he seemed oblivious to the fact that she had been sent to be on his side, that this kidnapping was in fact a ruse, a sham--in the words of Allen Dale, a con.  
He caught her looking at him, no doubt with a newly born fright in her eyes at understanding that this man, supposed to be a friend, for whatever reason understood her to be quite other than that. The venom in his words to her just minutes ago was genuine. He hated her. Thought her the enemy. The pistol barrel increased its possession of her neck, warning her off any sudden movement. The swastika armband, its unpleasant taste of starch, and sensation of scratchy edges worrying her mouth and throat preventing her from vindicating herself.   
The only hope for it was the docks, then, as soon as soon could be. The docks and Dick Giddons. A quick escape and leisurely explanation once they were away. Or, the docks, and the Germans blowing the flier's head off and him dead without ever having known that friendlies had come to rescue him, that he held a dangerous weapon to one of them even now.  
He was so close to her here, his thigh alongside her own. Should he be shot, be killed, would she find she wore a piece of him, too? And would she find that she bore a responsibility in that, as well?


	9. Flight

From his manacled spot in the Lieutenant's office closet, Eagle Squadron Flight Commander Thomas Carter had felt himself begin to sweat in dread and anticipation of what was to come next, as Gisbonnhoffer seemed (by all audible sounds) to have cornered Anya Grigorovna in his office yet again.   
And yet, something about this encounter was different. Carter listened more closely. It was not Anya at all, but another woman, at whose unexpected appearance the Lieutenant was quite overcome.  
He asked after her health, her father's health. Damn him if he wasn't actually cordial, actually courtly in his attentions to her. Such deferential behavior on his part made his vile conduct toward Anya all that more of an affront.  
"Happy birthday," this new woman had said, her greeting followed in short order by the familiar sounds of the desk being primed once more for ill-use in accommodation of Gisbonnhoffer's twisted rutting.  
All it took was his tormentor's moan of, "Ah, Marion," for Carter to know that this was his moment, this was his one, best chance. To take hostage the obvious object (clearly complicit, she had even come so far as to break into a prison camp to see Gisbonnhoffer) of his enemy's consuming obsession.  
And so he had done, taking a German officer out with him: one shot, one kill. One car, no written requisition needed.  
And here he was, Thomas Carter, sharing a getaway car with this woman, the Lieutenant's 'Marion'. Even in her now-disheveled state--her dress ink-stained, her hair slightly awry, her cheeks and face distorted by the gag he had employed on her--he was not so absent of his own body not to note that the German's fascination with her (at least insofar as her looks) was not mis-placed.  
A pretty girl. An islander. The kind of person he was meant to be defending, to be fighting for. A pretty girl, a local islander, a non-combatant: collaborating with his enemy. Becoming his enemy. Marion. How he despised the sound of that name and all that it represented to his tormentor, the Lieutenant. Could this girl driving this car know what her consensual relationship with Gisbonnhoffer had done to Anya Grigorovna? What it had forced his already brought-low countrywoman to become? To endure? Were he to live long enough to find the time, he could not wait to inform her, most eloquently.  
After a long stretch of very rural and undisturbed dirt-packed road, they were coming up nearly within sight of the docks. He made it clear that he wanted her to pull off into a gravelly side-road, and from there into the underbrush. The rough road surface and scrub would do well to camouflage their tire tracks.   
Once the engine was turned off, he did not think twice--pretty face and great pair of stems meaningless in that moment--about bringing the pistol grip to the base of her skull and knocking her out cold before tightly binding her hands and feet.  
He needed to leave her here while he sneaked to the harbor and quietly managed to appropriate (in record time, for sure) a uniform.  
He didn't like the idea of leaving her alone, his only true currency in this escape scenario. He could not afford to risk her so only to lose her.  
But the universe has a way, sometimes, when you least expect it, of producing exactly what you need when you need it, and as he turned away from the concealed car and began to head toward the harbor, he heard a knocking about sound coming from the trunk. He made certain to hold one of his pistols defensively as he lifted the lid with his other hand, and found quite quickly that he could lower the handgun without further worry.  
It was the Gypsy boy, an unexpected stowaway. It would seem he had locked himself in the trunk, gambling on (it would seem) his own successful escape.   
"Molodoy chelovyek," Carter addressed him, speaking to the Gypsy in their common language of Russian, and not knowing his name, "stay. Mind the lady. Shoot Germans." Carter surrendered his second pistol, hopeful the teenager knew how to use it if necessary.  
The Gypsy boy accepted the weapon, and looked over to the bound, gagged and unconscious 'Marion' still inside the car with no particular curiosity. He gave a sharp nod in reply to Carter's Russian, and pointed the gun back to indicate the contents of the trunk. Which proved, beyond fortuitously, to hold several just-laundered officer's uniforms, and a large duffel sack of dirty laundry clearly destined for cleaning.  
Carter had the uniform on in a flash, the dirty laundry dumped out into the trunk, the duffel now empty and ready to be of service to him.   
"Kak vaz zavoot?" he demanded the boy's name as he holed the coat's last brass button.  
The boy stared at him for a hard minute (a hard minute they did not really have to waste), as though he had not quite understood the Russian of the request. Finally, he spit out a one-syllable name, "Djak. Meenya zavoot Djak."  
Carter did not bother to mouth any of the usual social (or Courtly) Russian pleasantries in response to learning the boy's name, his own mind already racing toward the riddle of the harbor and what small snip of a plan he had fabricated with what tools he had found: escaped prisoner, uniform, hand weapons, laundry bag.  
He pulled the blessedly-long-enough duffle over the unconscious woman, obscuring her within it entirely, and directed the boy. "Carry her," he said, raising his pistol to the kid's becoming-ever-more-perceptive, familiar dark eyes. "You are my prisoner." And he set out to march them toward the harbor.

* * *

 

The terrain was ridiculous. The landscape gave one the erroneous feeling of a summer holiday: dunes, scrubby woods bordering on beaches, and pretty-enough-for-a-postcard views, vivid with blues and greens even in October.   
It was October, right? his mind questioned him. He had bailed out of his Spitfire in late August, trying to time himself (though his plane was aflame and falling fast) to land on Burhou, one of the uninhabited islands, only a little large than a mile. But it had not proven a night for precision. He and his plane, and the bombs onboard, had never gotten to France, their true destination. The mile-worth of water between Alderney and Burhou known locally as the Swinge could see tides up to seven knots, impressive overfalls and strong winds. And the other men (and himself) had fallen into the sea, where the others, less expert jumpers, less proficient swimmers, more unlucky in their flotation gear, more unlucky when the Germans arrived to retrieve them from the waves (they shot most on sight), perished. The Jerries had chosen to keep him, a trophy to interrogate, the highest-ranking officer among the doomed flight crew.  
"Keep him," the shorter, rounder Nazi (later he knew to be the Kommandant) had ordered back on land, at the review of him. "He is...the prettiest of the lot."   
At this declaration shots had rang out one either side of Carter, what was left of his flight crew felled like stones all about him.  
They were nearly past the jetty, within sight of the docked boats.  
"Twenty-two;" Carter thought, reciting from rote in his mind to calm himself, "one card too many, dealer wins. Six-five-four; countdown to escape. Eight thirty-two; the New Jersey house number to which he sent no letters. Thirty-six; his age when he had stopped counting the men he had personally killed. And Zed, for Zara...Zed, for Zara." By the time he had finished the familiar, grounding litany in his head he had picked the boat best suited to his (their, now, he supposed) need and their urgency.  
He marched (still behind the Gypsy masquerading as his prisoner, and shouldering the dead-weight of the Lieutenant's woman) up to a smaller boat, seeming to be a fishing craft that was one of the first vessels to present itself at the dock. (As they were coming up the beach toward the harbor and not using the main access of the inland road, this boat proved to be the most-distantly docked vessel from the harbormaster's office.)  
"I require your boat," Carter told the young man at the wheel, affecting his best German accented English and arrogant mien. In the distance he thought he began to hear the arrival and bustle of automobiles and men being assembled to search.  
The young skipper's eyes were the size of dinner plates in reaction to the activity further up the dock. "Sir, I--I am meant to wait here, most urgently."   
In response to this statement of noncompliance with his direct demand, Carter lightly inclined his head, narrowing one eye in a gesture that telegraphed dangerous displeasure.  
"You may see my papers, if you like," the callow boatman reached into his oilskin coat. The early afternoon light showed the lightest of shadows along the young man's jaw, a beard barely-there enough to need be shaved.  
The sound of dogs being mustered traveled over to them on the now-rising wind.  
Before the young man's hand could pull back out of his coat, Carter's finger squeezed the trigger on his handgun. One shot. One kill. No further impediment to escape. "My boat," he said aloud, still employing the German accent to his speech, stepping over the body, messy on the decking, his pistol-free hand instructing the Gypsy boy to deposit his own heavy load nearby.  
Once at the wheel (sheltered under a small four-foot by four-foot wheelhouse), Carter strove, with all his available mental concentration, to recall the exact geography of this place, Alderney, in relation to the other nearby islands. He engaged the boat's engine and set their course due East, as though he hoped to make landfall along the French coast, some ten or so miles away. But he knew, to outwit this enemy he would have to do the unthinkable (for a man bent on escape and freedom). Once out on the open water he would have to re-direct them, piloting them some degrees west and south to one of the smaller islands nestled between the two larger governing powers of Guernsey and Jersey, the very belly of the Occupation beast, and try to lose the Germans among their own terrain. Any other option was certain death (after more torture and interrogation).  
He did not bother to share his plan with Djak the Gypsy boy. The kid had put his faith in him so far. He would clearly do as he was told, asking few questions. Good qualities in such a situation. It was unlikely he had anything of significance to contribute in regard to a working knowledge of the topography surrounding them.  
He could tag along, Carter supposed. As long as he didn't slow them down or handicap him in any way. As long as there might be a chance that he could prove useful.  
It would not take the Germans left behind long to realize that the flier and the Lieutenant's woman had either gotten away under their very noses, or that they were still free on the island. He hoped, sincerely for his own sake, that the people of these islands were more as they had been presented in his debrief before that last flight: patriotic, willing and stalwart supporters of Britain, rather than as the two he had already met that day: the Nazi's whore, and this corpse on the deck--plainly a German's lackey.  
He would most likely at some point need the support and goodwill of these islanders if he wanted to live, if he wanted to breathe freedom again. If he ever wanted again (and yes, oh, yes, he wanted) to fly.


	10. Waiting for News

**Channel Island of Sark - farm of Blind La Salle -** Robin worked, repairing the stacked stone wall with an extra fierceness, though he, himself, did not notice it. His mind was consumed with the lack of information on how the rescue attempt (and Marion's crucial part in it) was going. It was after lunch now, time to move on from barn chores to the fields. He was standing-in (along with John) as Stephen's hired man for the day, as Dick Giddons and his boat were busy with the Alderney escape, conversely working for Robin and the gang.  
Luncheon at Stephen's had not been a particularly large meal, nor made up of rich foods, but nonetheless it seemed to swell uncomfortably in Robin's belly, fermented by his troubled and all-consuming thoughts.  
But telephone service and even electricity were far from standard on even the most populous of the islands. Here on the rural and sparsely settled Sark such services seemed all but mythological. There would be no news anytime soon.  
Perhaps when Allen Dale was returned from his long day of driving for the Kommandant, and had been brought back on the German army-run ferry to Sark (the location his forged paperwork listed as his residence), perhaps then, there might be news.  
Until then there was only his hands to the cold, smooth stone, the existing wall in front of him with its fissure to be mended, and fearsome thoughts of wild risk and the grimness of possible failure. And always, the fear of loss. Marion's loss.  
Unlike this pasture wall, he did not believe a fissure, such as her loss would create within himself (coupled with the strain of that first loss some five years ago), could ever be put right. No matter the skilled craftsman set to the task.  
 **Alderney Harbor and docks - Harbormaster's office -** The space smacks of German efficiency and of being well-run by the timestables of harbor loading and unloading. However, with Thomas Carter's escape, this office, set high on stilts so that it may also serve as a competent lookout to the harbor beyond, has been turned into a ground zero for all searching. And turned somewhat on its ear.   
Kommandant Vaiser, at receiving the news of the prison break via radio while at another camp, has arrived to be debriefed in person on the situation by Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer, displaying an equal mixture of rage at the prisoner's daring breakout, and angst over the identity of the hostage taken.   
"We believe it is possible the prisoner might still be on the island, Sir." Gisbonnhoffer stood in front of the Harbormaster's desk, the Kommandant just having stepped inside through the office's door.   
Vaiser's anger has been stewing dangerously all the driven journey here. "Gisbonnhoffer," the Kommandant replied, his tone only barely civil, "do you take me for an idiot? A fool? Do you take yourself for one?"  
"Sir?"  
"You have interrogated the prisoner countless times at this point. When I was not with you I have read the transcripts. Do you HONESTLY believe that this man failed to succeed in fleeing the island? Do you take him for a half-wit, a boob? You should never have let him leave your office alive!"  
"But the hostage..."  
"Ah, YES, the hostage." The smaller man kept his distance, as though the act of standing near his taller subordinate was somehow distasteful to him. "Forget the woman, Lieutenant!" He continued in anger. "Why did you not take the shot? Someone should have taken the shot!"  
Gisbonnhoffer spoke in a tone as though he thought accepting such blame (though entirely his) was also somewhat noble. "They were acting on my orders."  
"To protect Lady Marion?" Vaiser's swell of intense ire bordered on apoplectic. His eyes bugged, the veins in his neck stood out, his forehead purpled. He had the very appearance of Rumpelstiltzkin in the children's fairy tale, stamping his feet in outrage until he made a hole in the earth all the way down to Hell. "Screw Lady Marion, Gisbonnhoffer--oh, wait. That is exactly what you are trying so hard to do, isn't it? And in this instance you chose instead to screw over your career, to screw over me, to screw over the Fatherland's impressive and total grip on these islands, as you would rather have her alive for the screwing than be in my good graces for preventing AN ENITERLY PREVENTABLE PRISON ESCAPE!"   
Vaiser took a moment to inhale and compose himself. "You should have shot-to-kill Lady Marion, removing any leverage the prisoner thought he had, and then shot to wound him. If you had done so--entirely textbook, by-the-by--we would be sitting here discussing how to further loosen Flight Commander Thomas Carter's lips instead of running around with our thumbs up our arses TRYING TO FIND WHERE THE DIRTY DEVIL HE IS!" He walked toward Geis, crossing the room, and slapped the cablegram of earlier in the day down on the desk just behind Gisbonnhoffer. His voice again modulated to composed. "Happy birthday," he said, his low tone bordering on menacing. "Find the prisoner, or, in addition to other fun times I have reserved for you--such as the Russian Front--I shall inform..." the Kommandant picked up the paper cablegram again to consult on the names with which it was signed, "Greta, little Hans and Lili Gisbonnhoffer that their 'beloved' husband and father has embarked on an engagement and MARRIAGE TO A MEMBER OF THE BRITISH NOBILITY!"  
The tall Lieutenant blanched at the Kommandant's discovery.  
"And I would hurry, Herr Geis," Vaiser counseled, in a purr. "After all that you've personally enacted on Blondie, there's no telling, really, what he might do to your little Jerry-bag girlfriend now that he has her all to himself. What do you think a man like him," he paused, actually seeming to consider and relish the perverse thought, "might do to her? Hmmm? In the end you might wish, really, that you had taken that shot." His lips had come together in a tight pursing of faux-concern. "You have lost me time and manpower, respect and discipline among the other prisoners, and the life of an officer. Be glad that in this moment I do not choose to take your own in reprisal."  
He turned to go. "Radio our men on the French coast. Send someone to search that wretched slab of deserted rock, Burhou, and begin your search with the nearest islands, radioing St. Peter Port and St. Helier. We've got two soldiers here, I'm told, for every wretched islander. If they can't coordinate a search with those numbers..."  
The Lieutenant seemed to at last find his voice as the moment turned toward military matters. "And how shall I search the other islands? Sark has no appropriate vehicles to speak of."  
"Steal horses, commandeer bicycles, have the local sewing circle run-up a ruddy zeppelin for all I care--take their tractors. Get him BACK. Scorched earth policy, Gisbonnhoffer. The best way, the fastest way to find a needle in a haystack? Always has been: burn the haystack." He slapped his gloves against his hand, adjusted the great coat that hung about his shoulders, the sleeves swinging free. Vaiser hard-forced a put-on sigh. "And to think, earlier today I really thought I could quite like you, your nefarious plan to trick the Brit twit, and all...Pfft." He swept out of the appropriated HQ-for-the-search, the Harbormaster's office, and set off at pace down the steep wooden steps to the beach below, bellowing, "Driver!" at the top of his lungs.


	11. On the Water - Flashback 1939

**The Great Russel - waters between Channel Island of Jethou and Sark -** Marion came to, a swelling pain at the base of her skull, and a cloudy-at-best recall of where she was and what she was doing. She could see nothing, though she was not blindfolded. Her wrists and ankles were in restraints, and there was something very unpleasantly stuffed down her mouth and throat.  
But even so she could smell the sea, feel the rise and billowing of the waves. The scent of fish, damp nets and lobster cages came to her. She was on a boat.   
Well, her hazy mind told her, it had been awhile...Birthday. It was someone's birthday.   
A birthday, on the water. Her memory offered up a recollection, erroneous as far as time and place and the direness of her current situation, but she found she enjoyed the remembering of it, more so than taxing her sore head with divining where she was at present (and why), and so the memory played on, like a song half-forgotten, lyrics half-remembered, like something to hum when one was alone, mind free to wander. _Pleasant. Happy. Safe_.

* * *

  
 **1939 - America - Cincinnati, Ohio -** It had not taken Marion Nighten long to realize that she preferred the company of the Merton family far less than did her parents; these fellow Britons to which her father and mother had turned her care over upon her announcement that she would travel to the United States to put Saracen's Beau through his paces on the American Equestrian Circuit.  
But of course she understood the necessity of them, at least initially. One such as her father could not just set his unmarried daughter on an oceanliner without a proper chaperone to cross the Atlantic. Respectable people had to be found who were setting out with a similar destination. And the Mertons, Lord Walter, Lady Elsie and daughter Susan, were perfectly respectable. And perfectly dull and drear. Marion had decided this was to be the last party she would attend with them, the last day she would agree to take rooms with them. She was not here to follow someone else's course. She was here to chart her own. And she knew herself to be more than equal to the task.  
And...America was not England. The further she traveled in-country the more she noted the freedoms of the middle--and even upper--class. To be. To express, to...founder, and yet to endure. At least her somewhat star-struck mind told her it was so. Ergo, today was to be her last day of enslavement to the Mertons. Tomorrow would see the re-birth of Lady Marion Nighten: lone, competent, and unchaperoned.  
She would eat where and when she liked, take rooms where and when she wished, and focus as much time on Beau as she saw fit, without regard to 'important' parties or mind-enlarging 'occasions', many of which seemed to largely be designed to flatter and fawn over the Mertons and their noble status (a consequence, no doubt, of them visiting a country without such notables of its own).  
Today it was a birthday party, for a young man also connected to the Circuit. The invitation had originally only been extended to Marion, but Lady Merton made it obvious that she was sure that Lady Nighten would not agree to her daughter accepting an invitation without her guardians going along as well, as the family throwing the party were of no particular acquaintance to either the Mertons or the Nightens.  
She walked into the amusement park, dubbed "Coney Island" (surely a misnomer--even Marion knew that to be located in New York City), on the arm of Susan Merton (no rights to a hereditary 'Lady' prefixing her name), and made their way to the nearby pavilion known as 'Moonlight Gardens', where the late-afternoon party was being held.   
It was a two-story square structure, hanging vines and creeper climbing down romantically from the upper floor's cast iron verandah. It was like walking into a large building, the center of which was without a roof, open to the sky, ringed by the squarely linear building and its second-floor balcony with cast iron railings. The 250-foot by 100-foot dancefloor (it did not seem to be proper to call it a ballroom as it was not, technically, a room) under the stars once it turned night, colorful paper lanterns and such strung on haphazard wires and ropes that crisscrossed the open area, a bar visible along one wall.   
The musicians had a covered bandstand to play under, and the cement-covered-in-rubber dancefloor was surrounded (as in many a nightclub) by small tables intimately mushrooming about its edges, some located further back, under the balcony overhang.  
It was not dark, though, and dinner would be served first, before night fell and the dancing (at least for the younger set) truly began in earnest.  
Marion excused herself quickly, leaving Susan at a table with her parents, and walked back toward the entrance. Before she got there she sighted a nicely concealed table behind some greenery and thought to hide out, luxuriating in being unmonitored for the present moment.  
It was the smoke of his cigarette that first told her she was not truly alone.   
"Lost a wager on you, today," came a man's voice, its country drawl appealing, but unfamiliar to her.  
She tried to incline her head from where she sat, but was still unable to see who was speaking, so she stood and found the source of the voice well-hidden behind a large potted fern, his back leaning against a balcony's white support column.  
A frown furrowed her brow, but not seriously. "You were betting on me?"  
"No," the man answered, putting fingers through his wavy (prematurely) salt and pepper hair to keep the curls slicked back against his head, as was the style, "on your horse, to be exact." He was not satisfied with the result, and tasked his fingers with the same job a second time. His eyes flicked up from where they had been intent on studying his cigarette's lengthening ash, to meet hers. "And maybe, maybe, a little on you."  
Her tone of surprise was genuine. "You bet against Beau?" She took a step closer. This had suddenly become interesting.  
"Hmmm." He made a sort of harrumph noise. "Didn’t think he could do it. Didn't think he had it in him to take the day."  
"Well," she spoke to him as though he were an errant child, "you will know better next time." Finding she did not like the idea that their conversation was over, she found a leading question to ask. "Was it very much to lose? I suppose you will say something like, 'oh, it is only money...'" It was the sort of thing men of her set at home were often heard to say, whether the amount in question was one they could afford to lose or not. A face-saving statement, a show of above-it-all indifference.  
"Oh, it was far more than money, Sugar," this man said, bringing his foot down from the column, his shoulders and upper body coming away from the structure. "I lost the right to first introductions to his rider. And first dance."  
So this was a little game, after all. Well, she was good at little games. "So you are a thief, as well as a poor handicapper."  
"How's that?" He finally let the ash fall, flicking it off into the moist soil of the potted fern.  
"For you have stolen one reward from the rightful winner. All you must do is exchange names with me. And I do not doubt but that the invitation to a dance can be far behind..."  
"Fred Otto," he nodded his head in a congenial, if not formal, way. "Unsuccessful riverboat gambler, and accused thief."  
"So it is your birthday!" She extended her hand for the shaking. She had not known to whom the party invitation had referred, only that the Otto family were well-known on, and importantly involved in, the Circuit. "Marion Nighten, as I see you well know."  
He took her hand, examining it for a moment, almost as though studying her nails to see if there were any dirt under them. "Never met a 'lady' before, Marion. Am I supposed to kiss this?"  
She laughed, but genuinely, without simpering as many women would. "I rather think I would like you less if you did."  
"Alright," he said, "can I offer you a smoke? Roll my own, but do a pretty good job of it, if I say so myself."  
She shook her head to decline the offer. "Are you going to ask me to dance?" she questioned him, a little curious at why he had not already done so.  
"Well," he shared, looking out from his hiding place to the still-arriving party guests. "Tell the truth, I probably won't be here when the real dancin' starts--not 'til they start to close the place down, and I'm sure a...gentle flower like yourself would long ago be settled back in her stall at the barn. Which barn is it, would you say, where you're at with your folks?"  
"Not my 'folks', thank you very much, indeed, and the Mertons and I are at the Cincinnatian." Conversationally, she offered a thought she had yet to voice aloud. "I like it here, this far into your country."  
"Why's that?"  
"Fewer placenames stolen from 'the auld country', from 'jolly olde England'. More Indian names, more 'Cincinnati'. Only one of those in the world, yes? Zanzibar, Timbuktu, Cincinnati. It rather makes one feel like one's been somewhere."  
"And y'all are so set on havin' been somewhere?"  
She did not answer his question, suddenly feeling that she had let an important secret out that she had not really meant to share--much less with a stranger. She moved quickly to bury such a faux pas with action. "You save me a dance, Fred Otto," she told him, brassily. "I will make it a point to be here, no matter the late hour."  
"Then by all means," he began, noting his rival, the winner of the bet, had arrived, "let's take a practice turn right now."  
She let him (somewhat ridiculously) lead her out on to the deserted dancefloor, where the band was only lightly playing and no other couples yet were.  
At the sight of the guest of honor's approach, the band quickly ramped into a popular song.  
They began to dance.  
Some moments later, the singer joined the musicians, providing the words to the tune, "Rock-a-bye my baby,/There ain't gonna be no war./There ain't gonna be no war over here./It's all on the other side,/We ain't gonna need no ride of Paul Revere./We're gonna have peace and quiet,/And if they start a riot,/We'll sit right back and keep score!"  
Fred Otto had noticed the stiffening of Marion Nighten in his arms, the coldness that seemed to begin to emanate from her. He had never thought much of this particular song before, though it was quite admired, and given quite a bit of radio play.  
Then again, he had never been dancing to it with a girl from 'the other side', while the lyrics assured her that his side, his people, would be glad to let them suffer and fight it out while they watched on, keeping score as though at a sporting match. Great balls of fire, what an idiot song! "Lady Nighten," he began to address her. They stopped dancing, now just standing in an embrace (albeit not a very intimate or close one), the center of all attention.  
"Marion. Lady Marion, or, just Marion," she corrected him, somewhat hollowly and half-attentively. "Lady Nighten is my mother."  
"Marion," Fred began again, it sounding more like 'maren', "what say we git?"  
Her interest in the moment came back into focus. It was decidedly piqued by this invitation to 'git'. She cast a sidelong glance at the Mertons, still dutifully at their table, their dinner not yet finished, probably busy couching statements that would radiate the proper concern and disapproval at her dancing with a near-stranger on a deserted dancefloor for all to see. For making what they would view as 'a spectacle' of herself.

* * *

 

In less than five minutes, she and Fred Otto had found their way down (he knew it well) to the nearby boat landing, and into his 19-foot wooden Cris Craft Barrelback, and were free on the Ohio River.  
"Where are we going?" she asked, knowing no respectable woman in her right mind would wait so long to ask such an important question.  
"River Downs," he said from where he stood, one foot propped up on the green leather upholstery. "Be there in two shakes, it's just next door. Gotta see a man about a horse."  
"You're taking me to a horsetrack?" she asked, incredulity in her voice. She was not sure what she had expected from this rather unexpected gentleman, but track racing was certainly not it.  
"Wanna drive?" he asked her.  
She moved over to take the banjo steering wheel, and his arms circled around her from the back, trying to instruct her at how to handle the throttle and steer, and conveniently embracing her.  
Marion turned her head suddenly, almost colliding with his nose and said, somewhat insulted, "I know how to pilot a boat, thank you very much."  
At her unexpected assertion (he had assumed that even if she was proficient with watercraft she would have played along with the 'my hands over your hands, my arms about you' flirting game) Fred promptly slid away from her proscribed personal space.  
She hadn't meant to be quite so blunt. She offered an apology in the form of an interested question. "Why skive on your own party?"  
He tilted his head away from her direction for a moment, as though thinking, as though deciding whether to answer after her tart rebuff of him. He shrugged. "Tradition, etiquette, expectations. My life has been managed since the day that I was born. That wasn't my party, that was my mama's."  
"And you will not do what gives her pleasure?"  
"Sure. I do. And often. But she doesn't run my life. Any concessions I make to her are out of courtesy. Not obligation. She's got her party, and now I've got mine." He smiled.  
She saw the dock and landing for the racetrack ahead. "And the horse?"  
"Lardner's Ring. I mean to buy her. But first I mean to watch her run."  
"The name," she asked, curious, "after the American sportswriter, the short story writer?"  
He whistled at her question. "All that and brains, too. Happy damn birthday to me," he said, for the first time feeling pleased that the night would prove long, indeed.  
Marion, used to being flirted with, but lonely, and far from anyone who cared about her, grinned into the late afternoon sun and opened the boat's throttle, sending all 130 of its horsepower into the waves.

* * *

 

As Marion (in the present) attempted a little grin with the memory of that day, the action birthed a sharp reminder of the head injury she could not quite recall getting, and she moaned (about all the noise she could make with whatever was stuffed down her throat).  
A moment later, a large fisherman's knife--rather, the metallic tip of it--rent the fabric before her eyes, and she realized she had been within some type of coarse canvas sacking. In the late-afternoon-coming-on-evening sun she saw a face, dark of skin and black of eyes that was unfamiliar to her. This person held the fisherman's knife.  
One of Marion's eyes saw the decking, against which she lay. The other saw what lay directly across from her: the waxen, lifeless face of young Dick Giddons, his eyes dull and empty. Dick Giddons, who would never again ask after her safety, never again ask her if she knew what she was doing.


	12. Market Day

**The Great Russel - waters between Channel Island of Herm (to the west) and Sark (to the east) -** Thomas Carter shivered in the small, half-enclosed wheelhouse of Dick Giddons' fishing boat, though the air off the water here was perhaps not so cool to him in the stolen wool uniform as might be. His feet ached and complained from within the pair of not-large-enough boots he had torn from the feet of the young man's corpse. They stank with fish, as did this entire boat. Stink, and yet he would have eaten the day's catch raw (bones and entrails, too) had there been any left about. He was hungry to the point the canvas sacking the woman had been in nearly looked appetizing. He had not been truly fed since he had launched his Spitfire away from its English runway in August.  
He would have to eat soon or he would lose focus, lose energy, as the adrenaline rush of the escape began to fade away. And focus and energy were not things he could afford, in these crucial first hours, to sacrifice.  
He could see an island from where they were: Sark. A commando buddy of his just a year ago had come here as part of the classified 'Operation Basalt', in a small (ten men) British raid of the island. From his buddy's loose-lipped drinking stories he recalled that there were caves aplenty, used in the past by pirates, and that the water his small vessel now labored to cross held a treacherous current, and tidal variations among some of the most extreme in the world. Though he could not see them, the waters beneath the hull hid a number of dangerous, sunken rocks.  
With forty-some miles of coastline (though the island itself was a mere three miles long, and only half as wide) such caves would be a blessing for anyone on the run, and a curse to their pursuers.  
It would suit him (and his tactical mind) best to abandon the boat to the sea at this point, let it be dashed about, splintered or foundered, obscuring where on the island they actually landed. Yet the same violent waters that would do such to the craft would hamper his and the Gypsy's ability (not to mention the bound woman's) to swim safely to shore. Assuming the Gypsy could swim. Assuming, unfed, that he himself would have the strength to swim such a distance.  
So there was nothing to do but to land.  
He felt something to his back, the sensation of a presence, and noted the Gypsy boy Djak, standing as though to inform him of something. He turned, and the boy extended something to him in waxed paper. The corpse's uneaten lunch: a thick cut of cold, once-boiled beef, a generous marbling of fat running through it, between bread.  
Carter stopped short of thanking the boy, sticking instead with the simple, "Chroroshow." 'Good'. Surely they could both agree on that. As the ranking officer he tore off two-thirds of the hearty sandwich, leaving one-third for the smaller, less important boy.  
He could not hardly remember a time he had spoken so much Russian. During his service in the Winter War he had found he preferred people to think him an ignorant American, just another paid mercenary of the Finnish government who understood it not at all. Such a ruse had proven quite helpful on numerous occasions, and when he was taken prisoner by the enemy, certainly then he could not have spoken it without revealing to his Soviet captors that they had not only a valuable prisoner on their hands, but also an émigré of their dismantled (assassinated, persecuted, reviled) former aristocracy.  
Russky-yizik. His own mother had refused to speak it once the day came that it was clear his father would not ever be joining them in America, that he would not be able to find passage out. It even got to the point that if letters arrived from overseas (which they did, though seldom and erratically) from family or friends written in Russian, she would instruct his babushka to read them aloud, not even agreeing to pollute her eyes with the sight of the familiar gracefully embellished Cyrillic script.   
Her country had abandoned her, rejected her. Robbed her, even; of the man she loved, the father of her child, her provider and protector in the world. If it did not want her, then she would have no traffic with it. Out went the books, out went the ikons. Everything thrown out that Babushka could not save or hide within her own rooms. A purge of their New Jersey neighborhood brick house, just as the Reds had purged the country of the Whites, the Komonoffs, and other nobility, all upper class like them.  
So he had become 'Thomas Carter', no longer Aliosha in the familiar, Prince Alexsei Igorovich Komonoff in the formal.  
He bit down into the dead man's sandwich, his mouth taking in far more than it needed to (there was no rush in this task, after all). He chewed it fiercely and swallowed, one hand still at the helm.  
As the food (long overdue) hit his famished belly, he had a moment where he thought he might faint, might blackout altogether.   
For an instant he had a flash: he was eleven, on the water. His mother was relaxing on a deck chair aboard the Imperial yacht Standart as they cruised about the Gulf of Finland on a long, meandering holiday in which the nobility, at their eternal leisure, took pleasure. He was playing with Joy, the spaniel, as the Tsarevich was too ill to come out-of-doors.   
He had long wanted a dog of his own. Playing with the good-natured Joy, imagining her to be his, he was happy, unconcerned (and uninformed) about anything else in the world. He had no acquaintance (as he did now, quite intimately) with the darkness of true anger, with rage, or consuming fury. His world was still enveloped, cushioned in peace, in gentility, in a serene bliss where having the chance to play with another boy's dog would be the most outstanding feature of his day.  
Carter shook his head sharply to clear it of such pointless nostalgia, memories that carried only galling bitterness with them. He knew he had been at war too long. Knew that the emotions he had been so ignorant of that day long ago were now eating him alive, had some time past taken over large parts of him. But this moment's introspection brought on by the boiled beef was not something he could indulge. Not when further torture, further imprisonment, was possibly just around the corner. Not when he, himself, was all he had to depend upon in the world entire. He had to stay within himself, his mind the only protected place left to him in this war.  
He was matroishka. A carved wooden nesting doll, each doll within it holding another doll, a similar, yet distinct entity: Pilot, Member of British Eagle Squadron, veteran mercenary soldier, POW of the Winter War, Resident of New Jersey, American citizen, Russian émigré, former Russian noble, grandson, son... His captors might pull apart a few of the poppets. Might shrink the size of the matroishka in doing so, but he would never let them get too far in. He could not. He would never.   
Certainly he might slip up from time to time, as when he spoke Russian to the Gypsy, lack of food and water and rest taking its toll on his usual dependably implacable silence. But he had too many layers to who he was to be easily laid bare. Each additional layer like a shell of armor, another flak jacket. His life too much a conundrum even to himself for anyone to riddle it out without his willing (or coerced) participation.  
Unpack them all, getting ever closer to the core, to what was most-essentially him, and discover the last, smallest doll (smaller than a thimble, the size of a single pumpkin seed), but exquisitely carved and ornately decorated: Zara. Whatever there was left of him in this world, of that eleven-year-old boy (that person even he, the hardened 38-year-old soldier, could still recognize as human) it must now rest inside her.  
It began, in that moment where he recalled a simpler time, recalled what it felt like to trust, to hope, it began to dawn on him that this escape was perhaps not, after all, a Nazi plot, a ploy or mind-game. Or that if it had begun as such he might have just beaten it.  
But his adult mind, so recently buffeted by pain, by torment and interrogation, told him to hold off on any such firm conclusions. He was not alone here: two others from the camp, both tainted by the German presence there, traveled with him. The woman, well-bound, gagged. Only recently again conscious. The Gypsy prisoner? He would have to keep his eye on the Gypsy prisoner. Like Anya Grigorovna there was no telling what the Germans might have to hold over the boy, to incite him to doing their bidding. There was a possibility the kid was not to be trusted.  
He cast a look back behind him, to the boy, who had sliced the woman 'Marion' out of the sacking with the fisherman's knife. Carter would have encouraged the boy to take the corpse's clothing to wear--it was in better condition and warmer, no doubt, than the boy prisoner's near-to-shredding garments. The oilskin coat, at least, even with the bullet hole, would prove a boon. But he seemed to recall that Romany did not like contact with the dead, so he held his tongue on the matter.  
The cliffs of Sark were visible everywhere, they held the promise of caves, and concealment. But their 300-foot height (the land mass of Sark resting on them as though atop a double-layer cake) meant finding a place where they might be scaled to reach the inhabitable part of the island--or finding a cave or tunnel that had its terminus, and a human-sized opening, well-above its sea level entrance. And he had no experience with caving.  
He brought the boat close along the shoreline, and instructed the boy Djak to assist him in sighting a good-sized, well-concealing cave before abandoning the boat and its resident corpse back to the sea.

* * *

 

 **Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -** Allen Dale did not have to get very far onto Stephen La Salle's property before he was met at the outer gate by Mitch Bonchurch, anxious, as no doubt all the gang were, for news. Allen continued on on his bicycle, down the well-rutted dirt track to La Salle's farmhouse, letting Bonchurch jog alongside to keep up. The other man looked of a farm laborer, at least in his attire and general muddiness, if not his bearing--which had never yet lost all of its nattering, affected Britishness.   
Though Mitch and Oxley were known to have been quite close friends before the war, Allen marveled (in comparison to Bonchurch) that Robin had managed in their time here to shed much of his London upper-class-ness when needed, enough to fool anyone into thinking he was as local as the dirt under his feet. His crack French certainly didn't hurt in such moments. Apparently his family had spent their holidays on the continent from the time he was quite a young child, and the language and dialects were second nature to him. In '41 the Jerries had deported anyone not island-born to camps in Germany, so being able to convince any patrols or curious soldiers one might encounter that one was most definitely local (beyond the assurance of one's excellently forged papers) was a skill (among the gang) much in demand.  
As far as Mitch went, it was best when he managed to keep quiet on such occasions, though his French was good. Only, far too formal for a farmhand (or whatever tradesman they were playing at being at the time). Best when he managed to keep quiet. But silence? Not Bonchurch's strong suit.  
"What news have you, Allen? What of the flier? And Lady Marion? Robin is most keen to know about Marion. Do you have news of her? Did they get away? Can I carry good news to him? He is out in the field, yet, mending a pasture wall, Stephen says. If you can imagine that; Robin at mending a wall." Smiling, Mitch chuckled at the notion, in between grabbing breaths as he still jogged alongside Allen's bike.  
But as Allen had not known Oxley before the war, the idea of the other man mending a wall, or doing any number of tasks that Bonchurch seemed to think surprisingly beneath their ranking officer, seemed...perfectly natural.  
"Let me get to the house, Mitch, get a warm summat to drink in me. Feel like I been biking for days to get out here. I've got news, to be sure. Some good, some less so."  
Using his pay for driving the Kommandant, Allen had taken rooms at the island's Dixcart Hotel, which also (conveniently) billeted German soldiers. Which allowed him to make a little money on the side (albeit German Reich marks) and do a little spying. He was greatly liked by the men there, even when they lost to him, and he worked hard to keep it so (being liked, and winning).  
Bonchurch was hurt by the brush-off, Allen declining to spill any of the news to him first before the others could hear it. But Allen had never liked to tell bad news more than once (and not at all, if he could help it), and he knew sharing such with everyone together would take on more the feel of an official debrief, than smaller interpersonal heart-to-hearts.  
Bonchurch ran ahead to the house to alert the others of his arrival and, Allen hoped (if it was not already), to put the kettle on.

* * *

 

"Ever a driver back home, were you, Allen?" Royston asked him from where he sat at table, all the gang but Robin now assembled in Stephen's kitchen, their work of the day finished, wherever their assignments might have taken them.  
"Nah," Allen scoffed at the notion, enjoying, as usual, being the center of attention. "No interest in it, really, not as a career path. No need to drive in London, public transport being the wonder wot it is."  
"When you've yet got enough coin after a night out to spend it on such," John interjected sardonically, good-naturedly ribbing his friend, well-knowing Allen's feast-or-famine lifestyle hustling cons on the street, or, in better times, at nice clubs.  
"My father had a driver..." began Bonchurch, and the men in one voice groaned loudly enough to drown him out, disinterested in yet another story of privilege and twee serving staffs.  
"Always wanted a car of my own. Was saving up for one when I enlisted," offered Wills, his voice wistful for the automobile he had so often dreamed about but never managed to acquire. "Dunno where that money's gone to now."  
"I daresay the Kommandant's car," Stephen asked from his place at the stove, where he was seeing to the kettle, "was stolen from one of the Alderney families that had abandoned it to evacuate?"  
"Dunno," said Allen in reply. "It is a nice one, though. But somewhat less nice, I'd have to say, when you're the one responsible for polishing every little, blessed wheel spoke, shining the headlamps a hundred times a day after driving on those dirt-packed roads..."  
The barnyard door to the kitchen scraped open and Robin entered the house, prompting Mitch to interrupt Allen just as he was settling in to detail the numerous auto-chores being the Kommandant's driver entailed. "Robin had a smashing Buick roadster back in London."  
Because Bonchurch chose in this instance to speak about Oxley, the gang's commanding officer, well-loved by all, no one bothered to silence him. Any information about Robin's life pre-war was always of interest to his men.  
Everyone in the room turned their heads to the new arrival.  
Robin nodded, setting his work gloves down on the press, sliding his shoulders out of his coat, and giving a small smile of agreement at Mitch's assertion. Then he began to remove his boots and other outerwear, sitting at the bench positioned for such along the far kitchen wall before moving to the basin to wash.  
Mitch continued, delighted to have found such a rapt audience. "It was a silver two-door. But it wasn't silver like all-over chrome, where it would be reflective, it was silver-y, like brushed platinum, like Mercury, with a buttercream--is that what they called it?" He consulted the now-drying-his-washed-forearms Robin.  
"Yes," Robin's tone was bemused at Mitch's loving recollection of his car. "I believe it was called buttercream."  
"With a buttercream leather upholstery. And it could really go. Couldn't it, Robin?"  
Oxley smiled, though in a muted way, as though Bonchurch had a better recall of this past than did he. Really, it should have been the most normal of moments in all the world, seven men sitting around, much like one would at one's club, discussing motor cars in painstaking detail.  
"Yes, Mitch, it could really go. And, indeed, long ago it has gone." He smoothly switched topic, the gang's faces still each in his own reverie about what such a plush and remarkable automobile might have meant to them. But Robin had no care for reminiscing or for autos when he had passed such a worrisome day. He had interest in what only one man in the room had to say. "Allen, what news?"  
And it was all to business.  
"There were a prison break today at the Treeton Camp, where Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer is stationed."  
The men all grunted their approval. Royston hooted.  
"Everything was chaos after that. The man wot got out (a flier, I am told) was a particular prize of the Kommandant's. A base for searching has been set up at the Harbormaster's office. They are not sure if he is still on the island or has fled to the sea. The Kommandant thinks the sea."  
"And Gisbonnhoffer?" Robin asked.  
"A wreck. This flier snatched his girl at gunpoint."  
Robin was ready for Allen to drop the pretense of his 'I knew nothing about this before it happened' spiel, for all that the men seemed to be enjoying the put-on show. "You saw Marion?"  
"Passed her on her way in, while driving for Vaiser. He didn't notice. I only got a flash of her. But I have been more than well informed all the day long at how fine she looked, by more than one chatty Jerry. Nearly burnt their eyes out, I reckon, 'been so long since some of them have seen a girl, wot's not a prisoner." His thoughts flashed on Anya. He shook her from his mind's-eye. "By the time I got the Kommandant down to the harbor and docks your boat," he threw a look over his shoulder to Stephen, "was no longer there. Nor Dick, neither."  
Mitch verbally shouldered his way into Allen's recounting. "And what of the bad news, then?" he interjected, in his way wanting to show the others that he knew of something, of some part of Allen's tale, that they did not. "What could there be of that if you saw Marion, and they have gotten away?"  
Allen let himself take a drink before the announcement. "During the getaway, Carter blew out the brains of a German officer."  
"Surely," John offered, quietly from his corner of the table, "I cannot see any one of us caring much about that." His brows drew together with the possible concern that Dale had taken on some prick of conscience or compassion where his employers were concerned.  
"Here, here, John," Allen agreed, heartily. "But it has been announced that there will be reprisals for the killing. Twenty-five islanders to be killed for the loss of the one officer."  
"Twenty-five?" Stephen's voice was a bald whisper, its timbre shaken.  
Wills' mind attempted to put faces, identities, to the newly condemned. "Will they take them from the camps' population?"  
"No, from Guernsey," Allen shared what he knew. "To stand as a warning against anyone there helping the flier."  
Marion, thought Robin, his mind immediately to the two most important people to him on that island. Edward.  
"And how shall they decide on who?" Royston asked. "Is there to be a lottery? A firing squad for those already jailed in St. Peter Port?"  
"It is over already," Allen informed them, bleakly. "Though the Kommandant would have like to have been there to oversee it, so he said, he felt swiftness the best policy. They were taken from St. Peter Port, among the day's shoppers there. There was to be no consideration given to age or gender. Simply, twenty-five to be gathered."  
"It was a market day," said Stephen, pointlessly.  
"Their bodies are not to be released to their families for burial until the flier is found, or his dead body surrendered."  
In a vicious undertone John let go with a string of foul Scottish curses.  
But Allen could not stop, he had to go on, to get it all out. "A new condition of the Occupation has come from this, as well. It will be made public tomorrow: for every soldier lost or killed by Resistance, ten islanders will die, randomly, as today. For every Jerry officer, twenty-five."  
The room fell silent, for what was there left that could be said?  
Criminy, thought Allen Dale, but he wanted something to eat, something warm and tasty in his mouth, something made with farm-fresh ingredients that the Dixcart did not always have abundantly on hand. Thoughts about the day, his utter lack of effectiveness in the wake of such doings to be banished, if only for a moment, in a task of self-fulfillment. If only for a moment to be free of the filthy feeling that came from knowing that he had discovered the Kommandant's chilling plans perhaps, perhaps in time to alert someone, but knowing that he was utterly impotent (cut off by the sea, an island away from the gang) in doing so. Utterly without a way to notify anyone.  
Useless, except as the bearer of bad tidings. He knew now why kings sometimes killed such messengers. Perhaps sometimes, perhaps, such messengers offered their own swords for the doing.

* * *

 

 **Alderney Harbor and docks - Harbormaster's office -** Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer took a moment, even in the chaos of this day of fruitless searching and constant reminders by anyone about him of his (perceived) incompetence, to attempt to scratch out a reply to the birthday cable received from his wife and children.   
It was immensely hard for him to imagine them this day (had been difficult for him to conjure them for some time), their life among the mountains and trees of the Schwarzwald, a world in which a vista such as he was able to view simply by raising his head and gazing out the large windows of the Harbormaster's office held no reality outside of books, of photographs that rarely did such a place justice.  
He was a man little-traveled, even within the Fatherland, before the war. Those first days here among the islands were like...an illusion he could not believe would last, as ephemeral, as marvelous (he thought) as a rainbow.  
He had originally been stationed on Guernsey, and within the first two weeks there he went about finding himself a proper billet, not happy with boarding among the other soldiers and officers.   
Because he had been working with the local legislature, known as 'the States' as the surrender was negotiated, he was able to persuade the civil head of Guernsey and presiding officer of the States, titled as the Bailiff, to assist him in his search. Although generally addressed by all as 'Bailiff', Geis had soon found himself on congenial enough footing to speak with him, this influential man, the top ranking public official of the entire bailiwick of the islands (save Jersey), on a first-name basis. "Jodderick," he recalled telling the man, whom he always had thought in peacetime he could have counted as a friend, "I am in need of better lodging. Superior lodging. Tomorrow we shall go out in my car and you will help me in this."  
Jodderick had consented immediately, his manner and level of interest, as always, congenial.  
But to Geis' dismay, the locations and situations the bailiff directed the driver to were for the most part substandard, or already holding more men than would be comfortable. And he had no desire to live so.  
When he asked what game was afoot, Jodderick declared that all such housing on the island was accounted for, and no properties existed that were not already taken or let.  
"Very well," Geis had cast a cold stare at what he thought of as his would-be friend, "then we shall start again, seeing houses that are already taken." He would not consent to such belittling treatment, even by a Head of State. He was the victor here, the superior, the one in charge.  
He could see in Jodderick's eyes that the man balked at the idea of putting any islanders (any of his public) out of their homes.  
Geis spoke and attempted to strike a chord of amiability, but failed, as his words came out tinged with threat. "What say we begin with the nicest estate not already well-occupied by Der Fuehrer's army?"  
Jodderick shared a glance with the driver, and did not even have to give directions to the address of the Barnsdale estate.  
Long before the main house came into full view, Geis knew he would take it (literally, he had no intention of giving the rightful owners anything for it), knew he would feel nothing at turning out its current residents, though the size of the house would easily hold two--if not three--families.  
"Who lives here?" he asked, having, during the ensuing drive, fallen away from friendly tones and any further acts of courtesy toward Jodderick.  
"It is a summer home, really, though Sir Edward, in his illness, has remained some many months, now."  
"Sir Edward? A British noble, here?" This was unexpected. A British lord, weeks after the evacuations and surrender, still living in the open.  
"Edward, Lord Nighten. A distinguished guest of the island, really. Retired now from British Parliament." Jodderick showed a brief surge of pride in the telling of such an auspicious guest on one of his islands.  
"Nighten. I have read his monograph." Geis smirked. "This should prove quite interesting..."  
They drove up the circular approach to the house and toward the portico entrance, the car's Nazi flags standing out in the wind from where they were perched above each headlamp.  
As Geis stepped from the interior of the car, his long leg unfolding out the open door, it was as if a light had been turned on in a previously dull (damp, even) room.  
Lady Marion Nighten was astride her horse, Gypsum, spotlessly accoutered to ride as though a dressage competition were about to take place out in the park. Her hair, though tucked under the helmet, was whisping out about her ears, and proved to be as black as the smart little riding crop in her left hand. At the sight of him, of his car, of his uniform, her voice was condescending, yet somehow just a breath away from disrespectful. "We were not expecting visitors."  
"I do apologize for the short notice, Lady Marion," the Bailiff attempted to intercede with politesse. "Herr Gisbonnhoffer was most eager to...walk your formal gardens. You know how admired they are, how well-thought-of by the entire island."  
And though he had no interest in flora of any kind until that very moment, Geis heartily agreed. He should like nothing more, wish for nothing more, than to take a turn about such gardens.

* * *

 

He had not commandeered Barnsdale that day. Not as he had intended to. He allowed Marion and her father to stay, to carry on as they had been doing. Did not even take Sir Edward's rooms for himself (though the older Lord's chambers were far-nicer and roomier than any others in the house). But the house and all its contents, all its staff, were, for all practical purposes, his.  
And yet he had never once imagined a world, post-war, where he would live there with Greta and the children. In fact, their very existence had come to seem like shadows to him. So when it became unmistakably evident that if he wanted Marion, he would get her (willingly, that is) only by marriage, it did not seem such a great travesty to pursue such a ruse. And he did want her willing. Wanted her to enjoy him as much as he enjoyed (would enjoy. Would repeatedly enjoy) her.  
No one on the islands knew the specific details of his private life, and he was not one for confidences regarding such. The state (or existence) of his marriage, his wife and children in Germany, would stay unknown, unless someone might inadvertently run across it in among the random statistics in his personnel file.  
He had thought publicizing the engagement might loosen Lady Marion's resolve, but he had been called back to Alderney so quickly, the matter had not been able to be properly approached.  
And now here he was, Marion, the thing he desired so intensely, possibly lost to him, captive of the flier. The Kommandant having discovered his plans for her, discovered how far he was willing to go to get what he wanted--what should, by rights, be his.  
The Kommandant's feelings on the matter he could not quite understand. Vaiser would be the first to confess he had four wives in Germany: three exes and one current, and yet the existence of none of them had any bearing on how he conducted himself here on the islands. The taking of local lovers (mutually consensual or not) was the order of the day for the entire occupying German army.   
What would it matter that Geis wished to let Marion think she had married him, in order to ensure her loyalty and consent? Surely the ceremony would mean nothing to him. He had thrown off any religious oppression of his mind a decade past.  
Gisbonnhoffer stood and walked the paper and pen to Diefortner, at the smaller credenza, the Underlieutenant on loan for the rest of the search operation from Vaiser. "Write a response to this," Gisbonnhoffer ordered the adjutant. "I expect it to be appropriately heart-felt."  
"Sir," Diefortner nodded his head and accepted the proscribed task. As he worked, he brought up the coming storm. "Do you think the weather will seriously hamper our efforts to recover the prisoner?"  
"AND Lady Marion..."  
"And Lady Marion?"  
"The storm matters not. We must leave within the half-hour and be out most of the night. We shall begin with those islands most-easily reached from here: Les Casquets, Ortac, Renonquet, Burhou."  
"But are they not all uninhabited?"  
"They all were yesterday."  
"Assuming we are not successful...tomorrow?"  
"Re-fuel and take on what supplies we might need, and then to Sark."  
"Sark?"  
"There are some among the dock crew that believe they saw a Sarkese fisherman near the harbor earlier today. Perhaps he was fishing, perhaps something more."  
"Then why not start there now?"  
"The weather, the probability that Thomas Carter would have initially stayed nearby, hoping to make for the French mainland."  
Diefortner returned his eyes to the cablegram he had been told to write.  
Gisbonnhoffer went on. "What authorities there are have been notified on Sark of the escape."  
The Underlieutenant observed, "You seem to hold little affection for that island."  
Gisbonnhoffer moved to the large map affixed to one wall, pointing out the island that looked like a diamond, weeping from its southern-most point a single tear. "Big Sark," he indicated the diamond. "Little Sark," the tear. "Sark's population, around 500 souls, communicates in an unintelligible patios (when they want to) among themselves, called Serquiaise. It is as good as the strongest code, as it is barely comprehensible to most French speakers. Its cliffs are riddled with unmapped caves; the entire island depends on but a single road going down to sea level. There are silver mines abandoned since the 1840s, here, which will prove treacherous to search, and time-consuming. The tides and currents around the island are extremely dangerous to vessels. There is no infrastructure to speak of; road are unpaved and cars are all-but imaginary. Intra-island and inter-island communication is archaic where it exists. Its geography is unaccommodating, particularly to those unfamiliar with it. Its people are necessary to the farming enterprise that helps feed our occupying forces, therefore the use of force is dubious at best. And threat of imprisonment? There is a two-cell prison in which to hold the uncooperative. Two. In short, Sark is a two-square mile nightmare. I would sooner wish to look for them in quicksand."

* * *

 

 **Sark - sea-level cave -** Djak watched the flier. She did not understand everything he said in Russian. Most of it, yes, but her grasp of the language was incomplete, and she knew that most of his speeches to her were couched (as they had to be) as though to a small child, or commands given to a pet dog. 'Go, Get, Do, Stop'. Not that he said very much.  
They had found a cave, and abandoned the boat to the sea. She did not always know why he was making the choices he did, but he knew how to make decisions, how to take action. Her culture valued such behavior in a man, in a leader, and something within her responded to it.  
She thought they ought to try and find some drinkable water. But she didn't know how to go about it.  
The woman they had with them, her hands bound behind her back, her mouth gagged, seemed also to be trying to say something to the flier, who was sitting for the moment in what seemed to be a deep contemplation, as though in an act of deciding what to do next.   
The frantic grunting of the hostage must have finally rattled him. He came to Djak and demanded the fisherman's knife. She looked at him, wanting to question what plans he had for it, but thought better of upsetting him, her best chance at surviving this escape. She gave him the knife. He walked over to the woman, whose eyes grew round and skittish at the blade he now carried.  
"Do you know, do you, 'Marion'? Something they do in the camps to their women prisoners, men like your beloved? What people like your loyal islanders do, once liberated, to the women who collaborate with the enemy? Funnily, the action is quite similar." He raised the knife.   
Djak felt herself freeze. She could not understand the words he spoke. They did not sound like Russian.  
In three fell swoops he grabbed a roll of hair from each side of the woman's head, and then at the back, and sliced through it, severing the locks from her head with the fisherman's knife.  
For a moment, the set of tortoise shell combs she wore held in place, and the rolls did not immediately fall, but the weight of the hair and the combs, and the length of the hair no longer able to accommodate the tucking, won out, and all the dark weight of her hair fell away from her head into black will-o'-the-wisps on the rock ledge about her.  
Djak watched the action to its end from where she stood. She was glad he had not killed her, the woman. But seeing the other woman's eyes, her reaction at what had been done to her, reminded Djak of the day the Germans had shorn her head, upon her arrival at her first labor camp. They had done a more thorough job than the flier, left on her nothing but a stubble. The flier had left this woman with a total of two, possibly three, good handfuls of hair combined, but at erratic lengths; three, three-and-a-half inches at the longest. The reminder of that moment for Djak, that dehumanizing action, still brought the remembered sting of tears to her eyes, even after all she had lost, all she had seen since.  
"I am going to find water," the flier told her in Russian, as he exited the cave.  
Good, she thought to herself, agreeing with his decision of what to do next, unconsciously bringing the palm of her right hand up to feel her own pelt-length hair.  
She noticed the woman had stopped trying to speak.


	13. Chapter 13

**Present Day - Allied Forces' Italian Front - American 5th Army HQ, bound North from Salerno toward the Gustav Line - final destination: Rome -**  It is a cluttered little hutch, erected speedily, as the Army was at this point in their offensive ever on the move. But it kept out the chill-okay, most of the chill.  _Some_  of the chill, especially when it was packed with the live bodies of busy men as it was today; planning, recon-ing, debriefing, fat-chewing, and gossip-swapping.

American Armed Forces Radio could be heard in snatches coming from a wireless. " _You're gettin' the third degree,/When you come marchin' home./You're on your own where there is no phone,/And I can't keep tab on you,/Be fair to me, I guarantee,/This is one thing I can do..._ "

Fred Otto sat, one knee pitched high to rest his right elbow upon, booted foot to the edge of a wooden stool, on which he was intently laying card upon card in a fast-paced version of Hillbilly Solitaire.

"Captain Otto?" an English voice rang out above the wireless noise and other racket. "Captain Otto! I say, I am told he was last known to be here."

Several officers, immersed in their own business or conversations, grunted or pointed toward where Fred sat.

As the English officer walked toward him, Captain Fred Otto spoke, his eyes ever on the cards in front of him. "Didn't reckon to see you again, Stoker, leastways not 'til you English needed us to pull your backsides out of the fire again." He did not immediately look up, placing two more cards where they belonged in their respective runs.

The British officer, his hat tucked neatly under his arm, rather than being affronted by the dig, seemed charmed by it instead, a broad grin growing across his face at the sight of Otto. "Our relative backsides aside, I came to settle up my debts, actually, Captain."

At this, Otto raised his chin and his eyes to his visitor. "What say I play you for 'em?"

"Can't, I'm afraid. No time at the moment." British Intelligence officer Roger Stoker took out a cigarette, offering one to Fred, who declined it.

"No thanks, I quit."

"Quit? Who  _quits_  smoking in the middle of a war?"

"Decided if I can't have the best," Otto indicated the inferior tobacco of Stoker's smoke, "why bother? I'll smoke again when I can get Lexington burley tobacco, or I'll go to my grave with only the beautiful memory of it."

Stoker gestured toward the pack of titillating playing cards Otto held in his left hand, each painted with an exquisitely voluptuous femme, each with a distinctly Italian beauty about her. "And does this new philosophy of yours also extend to women? 'Only the best or forget the rest'?"

"Workin' on that, Rog," Fred replied, enigmatically. "Goin' on a couple-a years now." He pulled an ace, and then a queen, replacing each on the bottom of his deck, as none of his runs were yet ready for their addition.

The British officer brought up what he knew of this HQ's future. "They say you are making for Cassino. I suspect you should like the sound of the name, if nothing else about it."

Otto smiled at the pun. "Stoker, it's coming up on Christmas here soon enough. Whaddya say to keeping what you owe me, and sending it home instead? A little something for those twins you got?"

"The boys? Why, I," Stoker was briefly taken aback. "I only ever mentioned them once, and then just to try and get your sympathy during that sudden death hand." His face took on a bemused half-smile.

"What? You saying they're not real?"

"Oh, they're real-most real-only," Stoker chuckled. "Just the  _one_  set, not two. I had not imagined that you even heard me. You didn't remark on it at the time."

Otto did not respond to the question of his focus when at a gaming table. "So where are they sending you?"

"Intelligence work, you know they don't like to say. I am meant to be transferred away from the Eighth Army, as Operation Avalanche is winding down. Seems an old school chum of mine has found himself and his unit boxed in, in a bit of a pickle behind enemy lines for some months now, and Vauxhall Cross requires my assistance in calling upon him."

"An 'old school chum'?  _Also_  in your line of work?" Fred scoffed at the notion good-naturedly. "You English-your Ministry of Intelligence is as inbred as your monarchy."

"Well, in-breeding, not entirely uncommon in your," Stoker said the next words stiffly, as though his tongue was unused to them, "neck-of-the-woods, is it, Yank?"

"Stoker," said Fred, squinting a little as he stood to shake the departing officer's hand, "you can call me any word you like, in-bred among them, but don't  _ever_  call a son of Kentucky's Commonwealth 'yank'. Unless you're looking to start another Front."

The Englishman gripped the American's forearm as they shook hands. "Noted, Old Bean."

"If I don't see you again, Merry Christmas."

"Yes, right-o. Happy Christmas to you, too."

**...TBC...**


	14. Chapter 14

**Early hours of Friday, Oct. 15th - Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -**  It was not unusual for 'the Saintly Six' to be up at odd hours, even to be awake for an hour, sleep for two, and be awake again for several more. Their years in His Majesty's service had more than accustomed them to such irregular schedules. As might be supposed, certain of them took to it more than others. Allen Dale had a lifetime of experience to his credit (or, perhaps his discredit) of all-night pursuits. Royston certainly complained about it most, though as a career sailor he was not unfamiliar with being up at all bells, should the need arise. Surprisingly, in light of his nervous waking disposition, Mitch had shown himself best-suited to falling back to sleep quickest, a skill (or instinct) for which the rest of the gang much envied him.

The early morning hours of  _this_  night saw each gang member keeping watch by turns, and keeping the appointed watchman company as he took his turn. Even Allen had given up on returning to the Dixcart (and its almost constant casual gambling among German lancers) to sit and wait with his fellows for what news the night would bring.

Robin and Stephen were conferring in the best parlor, as the gang continued to make the rest of the stone farmhouse (particularly the kitchen) their home. The parlor door was closed, more for the sake of being able to hear one another speak through the bustle of a low-ceilinged house filled to the brim with seven men, many of a height and size so that they were constantly bumping into things such as lintels of doorways, hanging soffits or beams, and various items of inconveniently placed furniture, rather than that he and Stephen had anything secretive between only them.

"I know we cannot continue," Robin was telling the older man, "to make use of you and your property like this indefinitely."

"You are welcome to it, in any way, large or small, in any capacity." The blind man slightly smirked, "I should, mind you, only ask that I am allowed to stay on as a lodger."

"Yes," chuckled Robin. "I do not think that too much to ask."

"Do you know," Stephen ran his fingers across the embossed cover of his Braille Bible, which he held on his lap, "here on Sark we are still a fief haubert? A feudal state? As a tenant, a 'feudal landholder', if you will, in order to keep my lands I am required to swear allegiance to the Crown, and be able to offer up (if so called on) one man for defense of the island?"

"And so each such tenant also has a seat on your parliament, Chief Pleas?"

"Ah!" Delighted, Stephen thumped his first knuckle onto the Bible's cover. "You have been listening!"

"Yes," Robin smiled to know that he had so pleased his host. "It is fascinating stuff...I should still like to make use of you when we may, perhaps send one of the gang here on odd jobs every now and then, if you will shelter and feed him in return?"

"So," Stephen's face wore a sly little smile, "not Allen?"

"No, Allen seems rather suited to hotel and harbor-life, such as it is."

"And John, he is, you think, too physically memorable?"

Robin grunted his assent. "And with his limp, Royston may hinder more than help..."

"Then it will be either Wills or Mitch?"

"Or myself."

"When you get hungry enough for..." Stephen fished for an answer from his usually cagey guest, "food?"

Robin answered freely, and with his heart, "or conversation."

"Or conversation," Stephen echoed, and let the words hang, warm with good feelings among friends.

Several moments passed before Robin sought his host's wisdom. "What thoughts have you about where we might best settle?"

Stephen reached for his clay pipe from within his shirt's breast pocket, and for his tobacco pouch, and went about packing its bowl. "Doubtless you agree that several places, used by turns, will prove more defensible than a single camp?"

Robin nodded, forgetting who he was with, but Stephen felt the air in the room shift against his cheek, and understood the gesture, though he could not see it. "There are wooded valleys that will prove excellent for cover and concealment, but also morph into dead ends if you are found there by your enemies. At the heads of such valleys you  _will_  find sources of fresh water, as you know there is no naturally-occurring body of fresh water on the island entire."

"And the abandoned silver mines?"

Stephen shook his head. "I do not know what level of disrepair they have fallen into. Perhaps you  _might_  be able to shore up several tunnels to the point they would not prove a death trap to you all..."

"Or that we might use them to snare German quarry of our own..."

"Only effective if you are certain you can do so and make such snares appear a  _natural_  occurrence."

Robin's face showed that he thought this notion both reasonable and astute. "Noted."

"Le Moulin, the windmill, is the highest point on the island, higher than any point on Guernsey as well. It will work excellently as a signal between the two locales if you might only devise something that will seem natural or lackluster enough the Germans will ignore it and not go poking about."

"Excellent," Robin declared. "I have grown somewhat over-fond of your windmills hereabouts. They feel ever-more like chapels to me as the days go by." He thought, of course, of Marion, nightly at work in hers, but shared none of his interior thoughts aloud. "And your recommended  _final_  fall-back?"

"You plan for such?" Stephen's heart asked the question with great concern, though his mind knew it to be necessary.

"I would be a poor officer, and an inept soldier," answered Robin, "if I did not."

Again, moments of silence followed, as Stephen turned the island over in his mind, viewing it in a military way, a way he was not accustomed to seeing. "Little Sark," he settled on. "The isthmus, La Coupee, is 330 feet high, nearly as long and but only ten feet wide. When the winds are high, small children can even be knocked over on it and swept down to the sea. As a last and final resort, make your last stand there and you know that you will see them coming before they arrive, and have abundant chance to take your shots and cripple your attacker. Your position will be defensible with such a small entry, not unlike a castle bounded by a moat, its drawbridge the only point of entrance, but there will be nowhere for you to retreat, save the water hundreds of feet below."

"Which we are told," Robin finished for him, "and our eyes show us, is of such erratic tides and capricious currents that it is not even safe to swim in."

Stephen nodded in agreement to Robin's reply.

Unexpectedly the parlor door opened, without a knock or a waiting for Robin (the ranking officer, clearly in a conference) to say, 'Come'. Communications officer Wills Reddy stepped into the parlor, his body's momentum carrying him further into the room than he seemed to wish to go. Something wild played about his eyes. His hair was tousled as though he had been pulling at it, as one might do distractedly when studying for an exam. The door, old and hung long ago, creaked open further entirely on its own until its enameled knob touched the parlor wall, revealing Mitch Bonchurch standing just outside the doorway in the small hall. Even in the half-light his own eyes were tense, alert with what looked like fear.

Wills seemed unable to quite get his breath, though he had only come but a few feet.

"Wills," Robin encouraged him, his own eyes growing large as they attempted to discern what they could from his fellows' actions. "Tell me."

"The Nightwatch," Wills began, stalling out. "The Nightwatch..."

Robin's eyes flew to the parlor wall clock, which he had not realized had been unwound for years, as the room was little used, and Stephen could better know the time by the chiming clock in the kitchen.

"The Nightwatch," Wills started again.

Robin finished the statement for the struggling Wills, he did not have to guess. "The Nightwatch is not on."

"It is two-thirty, Sir," Bonchurch found his voice, though it broke mid-sentence.

Stephen stood, meaning to go into the kitchen and attempt to fiddle with his outlawed, homemade crystal set, but Robin flew into the kitchen like the curtains were on fire, ahead of him, demanding Wills find out what was wrong with the make-shift wireless.

"Robin, I have checked it a dozen times. Other frequencies  _do_  come in." Wills shook his head. "She is not there."

"Look," said Allen, sitting in a straight-back chair next to the warmth of the cast-iron stove. "I dunno what you all care, she's my sweetheart, she is, the Nightwatch." He lifted the mug in his hand as though challenging anyone else in the room to dispute his claim. "I heard her first, didn't I? And when the war's over and I find her..."

"Allen," said Wills, not taking his eyes off of Robin, "shut up."

"What bee's got into your bonnet, Reddy?" asked John, standing, keeping watch at the window by the sink that looked directly out onto the road in, and feeling peevish at the inexplicably downcast moods suddenly on display by his mates. Even when he stood among his friends, his brothers-in-arms, he did so with the scarred, patchily-bearded side of his face to the wall, away from view.

" _Marion_  is the Nightwatch," said Robin, his tone without color to it, his hands all but crushing the improvised wireless in an effort to will it into broadcasting her voice.

"Wait, now," said Allen, concern on his face as he tried, in turn, to catch the eye of every man in the room, search it for clues. "How can that be, when the Nightwatch- _my girl_ -is a Yank?"

Ignoring Allen's confusion and distress, Stephen interposed. "Can you ever think of a night when she missed a broadcast?" he asked reasonably, hoping to alleviate some of the mounting hysteria he felt in his friend.

"Nah," Roy asserted, "only nights when we were not anywhere we might listen. Set ye clock by 'er."

Wills turned to address Allen, his first look away from Robin. "When Marion," he could think of no better word for it, " _left_ , she went to America." He shook his head. "The accent is a talent she learned there, a way to trick the Jerries on her identity."

"And how would you know that, exactly, Wills?" asked John.

Robin answered, speaking low and dangerously, though the danger was not meant to be directed at John, "because when I caught her out broadcasting, I asked Wills to spiffy-up her antenna and conceal it better from the enemy."

"Wot?" asked Allen. "And you were never gonna tell me?" his heart sinking lower every minute, his best girl not at all who he thought she was, and, in fact, not  _his_  at all.

"No, Allen," said Robin somewhat rotely, "I was never 'gonna' tell you."

"Never," added Bonchurch, triumphantly, if somewhat quietly.

Robin shot Mitch a withering look. "Something has gone wrong. She was meant to be back to Guernsey in time-well  _before_  time-to broadcast the Nightwatch, and use it as a platform to trumpet the flier's escape, and the Jerries' incompetence."

"Oh," declared Allen woefully, still not quite himself, shaking his head from side to side as he mourned, "and she would have been  _brilliant_  at it!"

Every man in the room, with the exception of Robin and Stephen, looked to him as though they might chuck whatever nearby pottery they could straight at him.

John turned momentarily from the window, and spoke (as was sometimes his way) for the others. "Sir," he respectfully addressed his commanding officer, Oxley, "please accept the apologies of all of us, though I guess you have already got Wills' on the matter," Wills nodded, "as Lady Marion is, on your word, the Nightwatch, there is no reason why she cannot be trusted, and why we should not all support you one-hundred percent in using her as an asset and contact."

"Yeah," agreed Royston, sheepishly. "It was only we thot you'd gone and gotcher head turned by a woman is all. If we had known, we never woulda said those things wot we did. Not to your face nor behind ye back."

Robin looked up from the homemade wireless device to his men, his friends, his fellows. "That is all well-and-good. And in other circumstances I would happily gloat over your fine words, but there is no time for it right now. For as far as I can see, we're missing a man, and we've no easy way to find her or the flier, and no quick way to assess how bad their situation might be."

Hard faces showed all around.

Robin hung his head and confessed. "I do not know the first thing, even, that might be done."

"They have the boat," offered Mitch, unhelpfully.

"Dick's not returned from Alderney," added Royston, equally unhelpfully cataloguing what they could not depend upon.

Allen set aside grieving his Nightwatch discovery. "It's pure suicide to try anything tonight. A storm is blowin' up. Recall; I have been out on the water this evening between here and Alderney. It would be death to sail tonight in anything shorter than thirty-five feet. And  _even I_  don't know how to get you anything like that on so short a notice."

Wills tried to hold in a disgusted glance meant for Allen, whom he knew was only trying to be helpful, but whose mention of a dangerous sea-storm brewing and blowing had left Robin looking even more defeated at the thought of Marion being out in it.

John appealed to anyone who might answer, "Do you think they would come back here? That they have found shelter in the caves?"

"Let us hope not," Stephen warned, "as the caves are subject to the remarkably swift tides, and offer truest and safest shelter only during daylight hours. Come sunset, and they prove little but inescapable traps."

"But Marion will know that," Wills grabbed onto anything that might telegraph some hope in the moment, "being familiar with the islands. She would not have let them make such a costly mistake.  _Surely_ they have only had to hide, and it has waylaid them slightly from her return to Guernsey, and Barnsdale."

"Surely that is the situation.  _Surely_ ," added Mitch, with as much conviction as had he put the idea forward himself.

"We will know tomorrow," Robin announced, his mind made up. "Dale, forge or find me papers that will get me on a ship of Sarkese workers bound for Guernsey in the morning. When you are taken to Alderney tomorrow find out whatever you can about anything out-of-the-ordinary, whether it seems related to our escapee or not. Johnson, tomorrow you are for Herm. Use the standing pass you have as an itinerant day laborer there.  _Search it_. Reddy, stay with Stephen and work tomorrow, in case they should find their way here. Bonchurch and Royston, divide Sark, and little Brecqhou, among you.  _Search_. Stephen will know how to direct you to the most obvious places first. And let us hope they are somewhere to be found  _here_ , for with only the six of us, and few resources to speak of, I do not see how we will find them if they are not."

 

* * *

As he stood on the deck of the vessel of workers headed to Guernsey for the day, their hour-long journey across the water to the big island ahead of them, a wooden caddy of masonry tools that he had no idea how to use, much less any skill with, in his hand, Robin did not think back on the sleepless night he had just spent, nor on the tasks of the others as he had outlined them. He did not reflect to himself that, storm or no storm the night before, the waters were clear and the day crisp and bright as fresh laundered linen. He thought instead of Stephen, who had followed him into the hall when he had finally left the kitchen. The narrow space, with two grown men in it, was tight, and the light (as in many rooms of Blind La Salle's home) was scant at best.

"You must have faith, Robert," the former rector counseled him, troubled to feel his friend so shaken by what had passed.

"Faith"? scoffed Robin. "I must have  _faith_? In a world that gave birth to something such as the Third Reich? A world in which the population of entire countries condones the slaughter of women and children and non-combatants? A world in which," he exhaled hotly. He knew he need not catalogue the horrors and cruelty of the world to Stephen. "In  _such_  a world you speak to me of  _faith_?"

Stephen's tone was deeply compassionate, but just as deeply stirring. "But the very notion of faith, at its core, is to trust in something outside yourself. In a Power beyond that which you, yourself, can muster or direct."

"And I am to have faith not in myself, not in my men, not even, in Marion? But in this 'Power'?"

Stephen fought the urge to embrace the younger man, to physically comfort him in some small way. "You told me yourself that you did not understand what brought you here, to the islands, when she was here also. Is that not  _also_  something that has come to pass in 'this' world? Is your soul so betrayed, so damaged, that you would believe, you would choose, then, to believe, that such a miracle might come to pass for naught? That God is so intent on cruelty-directly toward you-as to bring you two together only to tear you apart?"

Robin gave up, he had no strength for debate this night. "I do not know." And then he shared the one thing that weighed heaviest on his mind. It was almost as though all conversation prior had had to occur for him to arrive at this: "I did not tell her all I would wish."

At this Blind La Salle smiled. It was a tender smile, an understanding smile, a smile that wished his companion peace. "That, we never do, my friend. I can vouch for it. But my faith,  _even_  in these times,  _even_ in this world, lets me believe that you will again have the opportunity to yet do so."

It was Robin who extended his hand to clap it on the curve of Stephen's shoulder. "Then I shall lean upon  _your_  faith, Stephen, and see if doing so will not germinate within me some of my own."

 

* * *

 **Les Casquets - 13 km from Alderney -**  "I did not  _plan_  for it taking all night to land us," Gisbonnhoffer growled as he again saw the Kommandant's adjutant Diefortner making marks in his ever-present notebook. "I could not have predicted such a storm to coincide with our need to search this group of barren rocks." To himself he added,  _though if we cannot land ourselves here, surely they could not have done so, either_. His blood boiled at the thought of the time they were losing in their search for the escaped prisoner and Marion by following the Kommandant's orders to the letter. How long into the night had he stared at the three stone towers, only a single one lit, knowing it was all the men tasked under his command could do to hold their place in the storm?

"To be wrecked on les Casquets," Diefortner began quoting, "is to be cut into ribbons; to strike on L'Ortac is to be crushed into powder...if the wave carries the vessel on the rock she breaks on it, and is lost..."

"What's that?" Gisbonnhoffer barked. Something in the tone, the poetry of the quotation, did not sit well with him, or his present mood.

"Hugo."

"Who?" still a bark.

" _Victor_  Hugo, from his novel, L'Homme qui Rit."

Gisbonnhoffer grunted, irritated to be out-learned by an underling. "You seem to know a sight too much about it, Underlieutenant, for being such a new arrival here."

Diefortner smiled to himself, knowing he was walking a thin line of being protected by his position in the current good graces of Vaiser, but knowing it was of no use to him to offend Gisbonnhoffer, whom the Kommandant wished to groom and grant some level of power. "You will find I have done my homework, Lieutenant. The Kommandant in particular bade me study on the British raid in '42 that lost us all seven of our keepers of the lighthouse to the English, when they were carried off as prisoners of the Crown."

"Yes, well," Gisbonnhoffer spoke all but absentmindedly, thinking he saw an opening in the churning sea that might accommodate a landing, "the British have been far busier about these islands since the Occupation began than we would like...or often admit."

"Sir," a soldier approached Diefortner with a message received over the radio. Diefortner, as was his job, handed it on to Gisbonnhoffer, unread.

The lieutenant read it quickly. "We sail for Herm, immediately." He extended the message back to Diefortner for the reading, speaking aloud so that the other men might hear. "A boat has washed ashore in the storm. The boat of a Sarkese fisherman. The fisherman," he paused as he made eye contact with Diefortner, expecting the other man to begin furiously notating at any moment, "was found within it, shot dead."

 

* * *

 **Guernsey - Barnsdale Estate -**  Robin thought it best to go 'round back in his stonemason's disguise, to the servant's entrance, in hopes to make contact with someone from the staff within the house, he knew not who.

Without transport (car or bicycle) of any kind, it had taken him, after being ferried from Sark, the better part of the morning and some of the lunch hour to make his way on foot (slowly enough so as not to draw unwarranted attention to himself) from St. Peter Port to the Barnsdale Estate. He had kept to the road, though he knew several better and faster off-track routes to this destination, in hopes that he might fall in alongside some local who might know of some news that they might share.

On this matter, he had had no luck of any kind.

 

* * *

 **Sark - sea-level cave -**  They had spent the night huddled as far in and as high up as the cave would let them get, the water never far enough below, as it rose tauntingly with the tide, to allow any of the three to feel a moment's calm.

When dawn was breaking, and the salt sea began its recession, each had their own reason to rejoice: the flier, because his decision-making had not needlessly lost all three of them their lives; the Gypsy, because she feared the water as though it were a tool of Satan himself (she could not swim); and the woman who knew, as being still bound at the wrist and ankle, and gagged, no stroke had yet been invented that might keep her afloat.

 

* * *

When Carter had left the afternoon before to get water, Djak had waited several heartbeats before going over to the woman, dark hair still littered about the rock shelf among the three tortoise shell combs she had been wearing in it. Djak threw a glance quickly over her shoulder, not sure how long it would be before the flier returned.

The Gypsy bent toward the hair, picking up the trio of pretty combs and pocketing them. Then, she shared a look of significance with the woman, and bravely put her fingers into the woman's mouth to withdraw the gag stuffed there.

After some coughing, which she fought through, the woman, in obvious panic, began to speak with the speed and urgency of a brisk rainstorm. Djak watched her face as the woman desperately tried to relate something, something of great importance, to her. But the words would not coalesce into anything she understood.

The woman tried again, her blue eyes straining with the effort of communication. "We must not stay here. The tide will rise. It is rising, even now. We will be trapped and drown if we do not leave.  _Now!_  I am a friend. A  _friend_. I am trying to HELP! Water. Danger. Must Go!"

Djak studied the words, tried to parse them out. For a moment she thought the woman might have fallen into speaking German, a language Djak well-knew the sound-if not the meaning-of.

It was hopeless. Compassionately, Djak reached over to smooth down a wild patch of short-cropped hair just behind the woman's ear, and in response to her gentle touch the flow of frantic speech fell silent. She knew the woman could not understand her Romany words, but she spoke to her anyway. "I am sorry. But he will come back, and you must be as you were before. We must keep safe," she said, promising, "I will see to us."

Marion felt the gag being stuffed into her irritated, swollen throat, and again felt the cold futility of her present existence.

 

* * *

 **Guernsey - Barnsdale Estate -**  Robin came past the portico in the roundabout gravel drive, to the side of the house and the raised promenade that overlooked the formal gardens to his left, which held the hedge maze.

The sculpted evergreen shrubs that ringed the promenade kept him from seeing that he was on a direct intercept path with someone he would have rather avoided.

By the time he realized Sir Edward Nighten was headed straight for him, it was too late to change his course.

The English lord and retired Parliamentarian stumbled out of the shrubbery, his clothes rather more worse for the wear, his jacquard smoking jacket open and untied, though the outside air was cool. His silvery white hair was unkempt, as though uncombed since it had been slept on. He wore only a single opera slipper, the left one, and underneath his smoking jacket, his shirt was mis-buttoned. "Robin!" he shouted, quite loud enough for anyone to hear, rapidly approaching what to anyone watching would look to be no one but a traveling mason in search of food as payment for a day's work. "I say, Robin!"

Robin chose to play the moment as neutral as possible. "S-s-sir," he replied, as he might to any stranger. "How are you this fine day?"

"Damned good to see you, Oxley. Damned good." He clapped Robin energetically on one shoulder, his manner turning subdued. "She is gone, you know, our Marion."

Robin's heart stuttered to hear her father speak her name. He replied with barely concealed intensity. "Do you know where she is, Sir," he chanced using the telltale familiar, "Edward?"

"Dead, they say. Dead." He looked at Robin, his eyes watery, and growing opaque with age. "As her mother and her brother before her." Almost tenderly he continued. "Your father, has he come? It has been a great long time since I have seen him."

Robin's hopes dropped. So all that Edward truly knew (for the moment) was that Marion was gone missing. Other than that he seemed to think he was back in England, perhaps even at Marion's wake.

"My father," Robin struggled to think of what to say to Lord Nighten about the Earl. "He sends his condolences, of course, but he has been detained...in France, on business. No doubt he will wish to keep his regular lunch with you at the club when he returns."

"Oh, Robin," Edward looked at him, and seemed only a breath away from throwing himself into Robin's embrace and weeping, when a voice called out into the park from the house.

" _Monsieur_  Edward! It is Eva! I am calling for you! Cook wishes me to remind you your lunch tray is getting cold!"

As Lord Nighten turned toward the sound of the young woman's voice, Robin slipped quickly away and toward the servants' entrance at the back of house, only to be promptly informed that a stonemason was unneeded at this time at Barnsdale, and to be (not purposely) informed by swirling kitchen gossip that Lady Marion had not been seen since sometime the day prior, which none of the staff could ever remember happening before.

He did not bother to stay longer than to accept a glass of water for his traveler's thirst.

Though the day was not yet dark enough to conceal his progress or guard his safety, he made for Barnsdale's abandoned windmill, the secret hideout of the Nightwatch. He was busy ransacking it for clues or aid of any kind, taking his anger at his impotence in finding Marion out on barrels and sacking, when he heard someone coming down the stairs into the half-cellar.

The footsteps had the sound of something of a woman's high-heeled shoe about them. And a boldness to their tread. He turned, expecting her, wanting it so badly to be her (forget the imprisoned flier-what flier?) he did not register what a dangerous position he had put himself (and Marion's work) in in coming here, and in broad daylight, nonetheless.

The footsteps did not belong to Marion. Not Marion, but Eva Heindl. He had only ever seen her before from across a distance, but on closer inspection, he had to agree with Allen's summation of her (as driver for the Kommandant his interaction with her on the level of familiar). Were it not for her at-present modest everyday attire, she did, indeed, have something of the look of a girl one might encounter in French erotica, or a Vargas model. Something about her mouth, which never quite closed all the way, put one's mind in mind of...quite fleshly pursuits. And her smile (though he had not seen it yet) bore more than a little in common with a chorus girl, a shilling-a-dance girl, game for anything that might result in a good time.

She spoke first. "I might ask you who  _you_  are, Sir," she said, her face hard, no trace of that smile to yet be seen.

He quickly cloaked his speech with a tincture of Normandy French. After all, today he was playing at a local stonemason. "And I might say no one needs to ask the Kommandant's best girlfriend who  _she_  is. But to ask how and what she knows of  _this_  place."

Eva shrugged. "It is Lady Marion's place. So I follow you to protect it, and its riches-and secrets-from a day laborer who should have moved on when he was told there was no labor for the day." She descended another step. "What is your name?"

"And why should I answer to you," he asked, stalling for time as much as anything, "what right have you to be here?"

She shook her head, showing her pinned-up blonde braids on each side. "Do not play coy in such a moment. The Nightwatch went unbroadcast last night." One eyebrow lifted. "Unbroadcast for the first time since it began.  _We_  both know what that means.  _We_  both, I think, fear what that means. Will you risk her? Risk any help I might offer you on her behalf over something as inconsequential as a simple name?"

She had Robin's attention now, though not his confidence. "Very well, you may call me, I think, 'Jack-the-lad'."

Her face had lost some of its hardness when she had begun speaking about Marion, but her expression was now tempered with boredom when he did not comply with her demand. "But that is not your  _name_ , 'Jack'. For I  _know_  you. I have seen your picture in Lady Marion's rooms, years ago, at the estate. For all that you think your beard a clever cloak, it will take more than that to disguise the dangerous zest that bubbles up in your eyes."

"Yes," he bypassed her declaration. "I think, 'Jack-the-lad' it will be."

As he glossed over her statement, so she glossed over his. "The man in that picture is dead. Dead in His Majesty's service. And yet here are his eyes. I may ask, tonight,  _Jack_ , will you be swimming? Or  _boating_  back to England?"

Those eyes she referenced narrowed at her question. "And  _why_  do you ask?"

She gave the careless shrug the French so often used to punctuate their conversation. "There is a letter I would have you post."

He chose to answer her in kind. "Well, I will tell you, Eva, there is no evening post to run tonight. And  _I_  will ask: What brings  _you_  to Barnsdale?"

She was far more transparent than he would have expected. "The butler, Mr. Clun, sent a footman to my house when Lady Marion did not come home last night and Sir Edward became...out of sorts."

"But you no longer work for the Nightens, I am told. The German Occupation has liberated you from such."

"True, I am no longer employed on the staff, but for the many years I  _was_  in service, the Nighten family showed me more respect in all my time waiting on them than any German yet has, though their lips say they count me as an equal."

He smirked. "And is it their lips you count on?"

"What," she asked, descending no lower on the steps, "you scorn me because I am good at having a good time? Because I am talented in such a way? Because I try to survive this war?  _Ecoute, Amant_ : when the Germans 'liberated' me from working for the Nighten family, they made no offer to me of any other type of work in its place. My family also must eat to live, must have clothes to wear, and we are six in all, with no man to help."

He watched her as she spoke, her tone casual, without a trace of true bitter or staunch conviction. She was both pragmatic, and unconflicted-seemingly carefree. He chose to direct her back to the main question at hand. "And Lady Marion has not yet come home?"

"You must know, people leaving home one day and never coming back...it is not so out-of-the-ordinary as it would have been in the first six months of '40."

"And do you protect Marion's secret?" Robin spread his arms wide to indicate the stores of goods and radio transmitting equipment around them. "Or seek to expose it, and her, to your keeper?"

"Ah. You think me cheap because I act so, personally, with myself. Yes," she agreed, "perhaps I hold myself cheap. But know this, I do not hold Lady Marion cheaply, not her life, nor what she does nightly  _here_. I was Lady Nighten's ladies maid, and later I served them both, until it was only Lady Marion who came for holidays. They are my family." And here, finally, a passion spilled over into her voice. "I am not in the habit of betraying my family. I do not know how you have come to be here, alive, on the island, at the estate, but I wonder: would you speak to milady similarly, as to the choices  _she_  has had to make in an effort to endure this Occupation? For if I am Jerry-bag to the Kommandant, what call you  _her_  as to Gisbonnhoffer?" She brought a hand to the closure of her coat, as though the chill was only now getting to her. "Can you love a person and hate what they do? I was reading the other day, a novel, where the heroine said that the greatest tragedy in life is that we so often love those for whom we are least suited. Do you believe that to be true?"

He squinted up at her, the day's light behind her, at top of the steps casting her in shadow. "I believe that I must find Marion, though I have exhausted any ways that I may know of how to go about it. I believe that she may be in great danger, and that I have personally placed her there."

At this admission she smiled, for the first time. To another man, a man less thinking of Marion, her transfigured expression would have seemed a reward for his candor. "Do you trust me, Robin Goodfellow?" she asked, strangely using Clem Nighten's nickname for him.

"No," he told her, baldly truthful. "I cannot. I have risked too much and made too many mistakes already."

"Very well," her smiled was undimmed. "I shall trust  _you_. You need only to follow me,  _Cheri_."

 

* * *

She led him through woods to a nearby untraveled inlet, its now-dead scrub and brush still showing that it would have been tightly overgrown in the summer. There, wonder of wonders, sat a twenty-foot boat.

"What is this?" Robin asked her, all but belly-laughing at the impossibility of it. "How came this to be here?"

Eva ran her hand along the hull of the wooden boat where it was inverted on the ground to allow work on its underside, surprised to find it finished: painted and lacquered. It had not been so the last time she was here. "My lord's son, Clem Nighten, spent the last of his island holidays here, building it by hand off-and-on for nearly two years. Because it was not finished, nor seaworthy when the Germans came, it was never registered, nor found to be confiscated. Marion has only recently completed it, I see."

"And were you, Eva, always so keen on Master Clem's hobbies?" Robin asked, intuiting something more afoot. "And, dare-I-ask, he keen on yours?"

For the first time since she caught him out at the windmill, her words came slowly, her reply considered. "That question seems to me about a time so long ago, so inaccessible now, that I can hardly recall it," her head tilted to one side as though she strained to hear something, "except as a sad song whose lyrics I could remember only when tipsy."

He stopped himself from prying further into the affairs (literally) of his friend Clem, and this one-time upstairs maid, Eva. "And so you are giving me the boat? Encouraging me to take it?"

Again, the shrug. "It is Marion's property, I suppose. If it is needed in the finding of her, then, certainly, it must be launched. I shall find Mr. Thornton, the caretaker of a nearby property, to come and help you get her into the water and navigate the inlet to the sea." She interrupted herself before he had the chance to. "Do not fear. It is he who gifted Marion his radio transmitting equipment. He is a friend with a closed mouth." She nodded to re-affirm her statement. "When shall I have him come?"

"I can do nothing on the water in daylight hours without the proper permits. I will tarry until the Nightwatch, to see if she doesn't return. I will wait at the windmill for her. If she does not arrive, I leave immediately for Alderney."

Curiously, Eva Heindl did not ask any question as to why his destination would be Alderney, and something in the openness of her face led him to conclude that she truly had no idea of anything Marion had been up to in the past thirty-six hours. The lack of curiosity, or the way in which Eva kept such to heel more than impressed him, from a tactical standpoint.

She cast an enigmatic glance toward the boat. "I will not even waste breath on the danger of such a plan, nor on the marks it has of a suicide mission." She sighed. "I do not know where Lady Marion is, but I do wish her home, as I know would her brother." Her lips came together (as so rarely ever happened) and her eyebrows raised. "Still, it will be a pity to lose such a fine craft to the folly of a one-man assault on Alderney."

**...TBC...**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It would appear Eva Heindl is reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall


	15. Chapter 15

**Guernsey - outside the meeting chamber of 'the States' -**  Nothing about waiting on anyone ever interested Kommandant Vaiser. After all, it was  _others_  who should be waiting on  _him_. He stood at the forefront of an attachment of men at the request-not the order (one Island Kommandant did not 'order' another Island Kommandant about)-of the Guernsey Kommandant, awaiting the island's civilian head of government-a politician-still politicking within.

One of the chamber's impressive double doors pushed open, and a young fellow came out, clearly one of the parliament clerks or secretaries. He seemed a bit taken aback at the wall of German soldiers that he encountered blocking his way from wherever he had been industriously heading. His eyes, instantly fearful, cast about for where to go now.

"Young man," Vaiser began, cordially, "might you let us know when we can expect your Bailiff to conclude his formal duties for the day? I wish to have a word with him before he returns home." He was all accommodation and good manners.

"Matthew," the young man burst out with his name, though it had not been asked. "My name is Matthew."

"Very well, Matthew.  _So_  good to make your acquaintance." Vaiser's tone was smooth, ingratiating. "Is there somewhere near the chamber, perhaps, where my men and I might...attend on the Bailiff? Entirely at his convenience, of course."

"This way, just this way," Matthew directed them to the office he had been headed toward originally, unable to keep his frightened eyes straight ahead. His head turned back toward the double doors that led into the island's governing assembly, as if wishing he could telepathically warn his employer, the Bailiff, what awaited him at session's conclusion.

 

* * *

"But I do  _not_  see," Jodderick the Bailiff protested, albeit quietly. "I am trying to see, but why-why is this of any importance? Much less one so dire?"

Kommandant Vaiser almost yawned. Diplomacy tired him. He had transferred here from Eastern Europe. There the Reich had not been interested in subtlety or negotiation. There the objective had not been one of propaganda ( _submit, Britain-it won't be so very bad!_ ), not one of constructing a model Occupation. Most days he rather preferred the ruthless totalitarianism favored (and permitted) by the high-ranking officers of that Front, rather than sparring with these panty-waist Britons. "OberAdmiral Jan Prinzer-ah, I see you know the name!-will be arriving from Jersey within the week, where he is even now overseeing the garrison and forces stationed, there. I should like to have  _this_  matter speedily concluded-ready, if you will, as a little gift to him-upon his landing."

"But why should it matter which islander women have traveled to America?"

Vaiser sighed. "Do not play the dullard with me, Herr Bailiff. You know what didn't happen last night, just as do I. As does, no doubt, the island entire. The Nightwatch-do not feign ignorance of what I speak-was  _not_  broadcast last night. For weeks now, in hopes of bringing about just such a hiccup, I have had my clerks scouring the customs and immigration records of your bailiwick's various ports of entry. With that information we have been procuring passports from those young ladies who have traveled to the mainland anytime in the ten years prior to the Occupation. This has not always been easy.  _How_ ever. Young ladies' passports showing them in that time to have been in America, or, for good measure, Canada, have been systematically brought to the prison here in your capitol in varying groups to stay overnight.  _Last_ night we hit the jackpot."

Jodderick could stay silent no longer. He spluttered out with, "But you can't mean to-on the basis of that alone-"

Vaiser grinned. Now he was getting to the part he loved best. Scaring the holy hell out of these sticks-up-their-arses. Idealists who still believed they had some power over their island universe, or even, their own lives. "Sorry?" He leaned in as though to hear better. "I can't mean to what? Where  _is_  your mind going with this, Jodderick? Hmmm?" Vaiser let his voice drop all pretense of cordiality. His tone bottomed out as he spoke instructively, as years before he had learned how to at the oft-times brutal hands of his own military instructors. "Let me ask you, by-the-by: Have we not...changed the rule of the road?" He illustrated with one vertical hand, moving back and forth. "Left to right?"

Jodderick's mouth closed. He was a man who preferred (like his island bailiwick) peace, tranquility, harmony. His term here at the States had largely been one of such: the export of tomatoes and flowers often the most important political issues of any given day. But with the arrival of the Germans their occupiers had indeed enforced change, at their whim. And the demands, the shouting: for all that it might be done in civil tones, never seemed to dissipate. "Yes."

Vaiser continued. "Have we not...changed the time you drink your sodding tea? The time you rise for work in the morning? The time you go home and f-," he held the potentially-offensive fricative consonant as long as he could, "f-fawn over the  _luvvly_  Mrs. Jodderick before you go to bed? A time, also, I might mention, of our making? Of our  _will_? If the Reich says it's now one p.m.-not two-what time is it, Herr Bailiff?"

He did not like this conversation. "Two, Herr Kommandant."

"Yes, that is good to hear." Vaiser took a quick breath. "The female overnight prisoners will be shot."

Jodderick gasped. "Lord, no!" As head of the judiciary it should be custom for him to hear their families' requests for clemency in such matters. "How many are there?"

"Oh," the Kommandant spoke as though to comfort him. "Only seven."

"Seven?"

"Yes," the Kommandant bustled on, a man with much on his schedule. "Tonight we will go again, I think."

"Again? You will arrest more of our young women with such passports, showing trips to North America?  _Why_ , when you believe you have the Nightwatch in your custody at present?"

"Why?" Vaiser scoffed. "Why, to be absolutely sure we got her, Jodderick. Silly man, we must be sure." He looked as though conspiratorially to the young attache, silent throughout, at the Bailiff's right hand. "Isn't that right, Matthew?"

Petrified with fright to find himself in the path of such evil, the attache could but shake, wishing desperately to never have the Kommandant look at him just so as long as he might live.

 

* * *

 **Sark - sea-level cave -**  The flier and the Gypsy conferred in the lightning-quick syllables of Russian, frequently glancing at the bound woman.

The woman, who understood not a word, noticed that the flier spoke longer and with greater rapidity than the Gypsy, whose outward demeanor and speech would have been described as taciturn, at best.

"We abandon these caves," Carter directed, not entirely sure how much the Gypsy boy understood. "We cannot chance our luck on them a second night. We need to find fresh water. Food."

"The woman?" The boy's eyes altered with the question.

"If we find enough for all, she may have food...I suppose." The question of the woman had become something of a persistent itch the last hours as he tried to process what to do with her. "Even collaborators need to eat."

"Her head. Hurt bad." The boy raised his own hand to the back of his skull to show. Djak feared she was concussed.

"From where I clocked her?" He thought of Anya Grigorovna, the things she had had to endure courtesy this Jerry's-whore. "She deserves more than a headache."

"You kill her?"

 _That_  question he did not like. "Why should you care what my plans are for her,  _Molodoy Chelovyek_?"

"She important to...Lieutenant,  _Da_? Kill her and he will make with you..." Djak struggled for the word, "vendetta."

Carter found a black humor in this logic, that the Gypsy was somehow invested in with whom he chose to enter into a 'vendetta'. As, of course, the Gypsy had no idea  _that_  blood feud had begun some weeks ago. And would only end when Carter was well and free of these islands. Or Gisbonnhoffer was dead. He guessed at the boy's thoughts. "You want to let her go?"

"She slow us down. Unwilling. Not want to be with us. You punish her,  _Da_? Mark her for others to see what she is?" Djak looked over and saw the woman, who was kneeling some distance away on a rock shelf, swoon into unconsciousness. As she fell, she knocked her cheek heavily against the cave's jagged, almost coral-like wall. The Gypsy rushed over, not in time to prevent the fall, but in time to try and quickly rouse her, slapping at her now cut and raising-a-bruise face to bring her back to consciousness.

Carter looked on. What use, if any, was this woman to him now? Was he only keeping her around to further torment her on Grigorovna's behalf? To revenge himself on the far-from-worth-it, bungling Gisbonnhoffer? Had it really been in his mind to possibly kill her?

NO. He did not kill women and children.  _He_  did not drag helpless non-combatants-girls, old women,  _thirteen-year-old boys_ -into cellars and riddle them full of bullet holes before plundering them and defacing them, burning children's lifeless bodies in a celebratory pyre.  _Nyet_.  _That_  was not who  _he_  was.

Carter shook his head like a swimmer trying to get the last of the water out of his ears. He needed food. And true rest. He could not very well drag a disinclined hostile into the hiding he and the Gypsy had to look forward to.

It was too soon for such a release, though. First he had to find them a way up to dry land.

He followed the boy's path over to the bound woman (still unconscious), produced the fisherman's knife, and slit the binding at her ankles. Without tenderness he took each of the apple-green pumps off her feet, the nylon stockings there shredded into spider webs. Such ridiculous shoes were worthless for the ground they would have to cover in the next few hours. He threw the leather pumps into the sea shallows at the bottom of the cave, expecting their weight to sink them. He knew, from experience, even a prisoner had to be able to walk.

 

* * *

 **The Great Russel - waters between Herm to the west, and Sark to the east -**  Diefortner competently noted that, after collecting the evidence from the found fishing vessel (battered by the sea, now useless), and queerly, also the corpse (which Gisbonnhoffer now had on board with them), and searching the seven-tenths-and-some of a square mile that was Herm had not taken very long at all. No wonder less than a dozen soldiers were seen as necessary to billet on the island entire.

It was now the Lieutenant's desire that they move on to Sark, stopping to check-in on tiny Brecqhou, Sark's western neighbor. From there they would proceed to Sark (both Big and Little), the home (they were told on Herm) of the corpse.

Herr Geis' instinct seemed to tell him, as though a pack of bloodhounds were employed on this search, that finding out more about the corpse of the fisherman (and what he had been doing docked on Alderney) would be the first true step in locating the flier.

 

* * *

 **Saturday, October 16th - 3:45 am - The Little Russel - waters between Guernsey and Herm, Jethou -**  Were it not for the Occupation, not for the curfew, the necessary permits, the ongoing oppression of any freedom of movement, the sight of a bearded man in chest-high green waders held up by braces over a cable-knit wool sweater, and a jaunty woolen ivy cap out on the water in his boat (though it was not a large one, nor one that particularly lent itself to fishing) would have raised no eyebrows among the island populace, even so early of a morning.

As it was, the action taken by Robert Oxley in launching Clem Nighten's unregistered craft was as firmly in the bull's-eye of 'resistance' as even Allen Dale could sink an arrow at pub darts. It was an act of utter defiance, and one for which, if he were caught, his life would certainly prove forfeit; as an enemy of the Reich, if not a spy.

It was a wildly reckless plan, but it was the only one he had: to return to Alderney (an island dangerously without a remaining civilian population to hide among), where Marion and the flier had last been seen, and trace them from there.

But first, to Sark, and Stephen's, and reinforcements.

 

* * *

 **Sark -**  Her head hurt. Her face hurt. Her feet had not been bare for such a length of time on such terrain since she was a child. She felt queer, lighter, somehow, without the weight of her hair (not that she would have said her hair had any noticeable weight before).

Her balance was off-whether from the head injury or having her wrists bound behind her back she could not be sure.

She would have gladly traded her entire Nightwatch cache of goods to have this gag out of her throat, traded it even if the deal did not secure her the right to speak.

It was not lost on her that her voice was being stolen  _literally_ , by a swastika. Printed on Geis' uniform armband, to be sure, but symbolically this crooked cross kept taking things from her: Robin, her freedom, her dignity, her future, her reputation. She shuddered to think where its ravenous acquisitions would end.

As she walked between the flier in the front, and the Gypsy to the back, traveling...somewhere, she wondered if it were in his plan to kill her. His utter hatred of her as he understood her (as Geis' paramour) seemed absolute.

Perhaps he felt her still to be useful as leverage.

 _You get what you deserve, Marion_ , she told herself.  _You live a lie, you die as a consequence of it. Nothing you could say now, did you_  have _a voice, would convince him otherwise. You have no one to speak for you, no one to defend your life-to vouch, or testify in favor of it. They executed Edith Cavell for her troubles, a statue in St. Martin's naught but cold comfort..._

She thought of her father, were she never to return. It would not be long before he forgot her altogether.

She thought of her mother, of Clem, so distant for so long from her present troubles she was nearly inclined to side with her father: they  _were_  dead. Unreachable, absent, incommunicado. The Guernsey Nightens, the Nightens of London. Distant relations now, at best, no matter the blood ties.

And she thought of Robin, of the day Freddy and she made their way, finally, to the British Consulate in New York City.

 

* * *

 **1939 - New York City - British Consulate -**  They had entered the large front waiting area of the Consulate, which looked more than a little like the polished lobby of a very fine hotel. The building was bustling with activity, but though running at a similar pace, it held none of the seeming chaos or disorder of a newspaper office.

Everything was muted, from the colors on the wall to the voices of those staffing the desks, to the ringing of the telephones. Occasionally a secretary would come out to the waiting area and quietly call for the next person to be assisted. Even this was muted, and eminently polite.

They were not required to wait long. "The Lady Marion Nighten," was called by a slender fellow in a bowtie and round glasses clutching a clipboard and files, his Oxford accent seeming like a long-wished-for postcard from home to her. At the announcement of her name more than a few heads in the room turned to see her, the Nighten family well-known among the general British public.

This attention did not go unnoticed by Fred, himself in a straight tie and conservatively striped suit, his hat resting over his bent-from-sitting knee. He stood, as though to accompany her.

She turned to him. "I think you'd better go smoke, Freddy," she told him.

"Don't want me with you?" he asked, his tone more confused than hurt-of-pride.

"There just might be...some things...they might want to say...only to me." She had used Clem's name, after all, his connections to SIS British Intelligence, to impress upon the staff here the urgency of her calling on them.

"I'll be just here," Fred reminded her as she followed the young man down the hall. He made no move to step out-of-doors to smoke, nor did he withdraw his papers to begin rolling one.

She felt what should have been the negligible weight of the paper telegram that she carried in her pocketbook as though it were Sisyphus' stone.

 

* * *

"I know little about the accident, Lady Marion," the older man in an outdated military uniform of the last war informed her, returning the now dog-eared telegram to her hand. "As your brother cabled, all six aboard were listed as casualties. We have some recent newspapers from home in our reading room. Too soon, likely, for stories of the accident...you are welcome to look through them. Your escort, as well."

"And so, you are sure: there is no other news, no possibility this is in error?"

"Robin, now, will that be referring to Earl Huntingdon's son Robert? Oxley, is it?"

"Yes," she tried to keep his attention, to keep him speaking to her, to try and get something more out of him than this casual dismissal. "He was..." She did not know how to say it. "We were...I..."

"Ah, yes!" the man reacted as though a lighted match had been stuck in his shoe. "I shall, erm, get Mrs. Trent directly." He harrumphed as he speedily exited his office in search of a woman to do what he clearly saw as a woman's job: comfort a bereaved girl, far from home, a girl (though he could not know it) convinced she had too lightly treated her future happiness, convinced she had contributed to the death of the man that had loved her, the man that she had been foolish enough to quarrel with and then leave, the man that she had...that she had...that...

She did not faint. Her collapse was not so apropos. She took two-and-a-half staggering steps backward, into the corner of the office, and slid down the joining of the walls until her knees were bent and her bum met her heels on the floor. Her lungs gasped, clawed for air like a woman drowning, though she did not know why-her heart no longer had any use for it.

 

* * *

That had been it, Marion was sure: the hardest moment she had ever had to face in her life. Ever would. If she had come through that she could come through anything.

A sudden notion ran wildly past the edge of her interior train of thought, like an unexpected streaker: why had she not told Robin,  _her precious, beautiful Robin_ , that night in the maze, all the things she had realized that day at the Consulate she had meant to tell him and never had? The apologies, the tender words, the dire fears, the horror of the black nothing that seemed to stretch out indefinitely in front of her without him?

Why had she not-if not articulated it in words-shown it in her actions? She could have wept. She could have run to him-embraced him in something more than just the brief, pedestrian hold of a dance.

Those years apart, that grief, that guilt and second-guessing, had grown over and around her true self like a thickening fungus, making any feelings hard to have-harder, even, to share. She had needed that thick layer to carry on, with the Occupation, with Geis, with-what little 'life' was allowed her, here, now: small, controlled, terminal. Robin's arrival at her engagement party to Gisbonnhoffer had been the first cutting into of that fungus, the first stripping away.

Robin's showing up, the very truth that he had lived had suddenly reminded her that  _life_  still existed: undirected, uncircumscribed, unexpected.

Even if she did not plan (or think it possible) to pick up and pursue a life together with Robin, his existence (as ever, as always) emboldened her as to her own.

As Robin, like a sunflower, turned ever to follow lightness, happiness, joy and sunshine, so she had learned her heart, her mind, her core, would ever turn to follow the path of the flower.

If Robin were the sun (and she was not convinced he was not), she was the moon-half in shadow, half in his bright, happy reflection. The moon, trapped three years under the curse of an unpredicted eclipse.

Should she have said? Publicly in front of his unit? Later, in the windmill when he gate-crashed the Nightwatch? Confessed it in flowery language while he sat, wounded, in her bath?

She stumbled on the not-quite-a-path the flier was leading them along as dawn broke across the sea. She nearly fell face forward into the shingle rock before she caught herself and jerked upright.

Perhaps, perhaps it was for the best if her story truly ended here: all unsaid, the book of their romance still firmly closed, Robin ignorant of her present feelings on the matter, her bone-deep outcry for him when she knew him for dead. It would make his carrying on less bleak, perhaps, than hers had been in the wake of news of  _his_  death.

 

* * *

 **Elsewhere on Sark -**  "No Nightwatch, Mitch. Again." Robin confessed when he had tracked down Bonchurch, a man looking the worse for his day- and night-long searching of the bucolic island. "I have come to rally the men, and ask for volunteers to return to Alderney, tracing them from where they started. It  _will_  be dangerous."

"It will  _be_ , I think," Mitch began, "unnecessary." Exultantly he raised his hand and displayed a single apple-green leather woman's high-heeled shoe, of a design and fashion that could not have been bought on Sark's limited shopping street...of a kind no sensible Sarkese woman would chance destroying in Sark's soft, fertile, unpaved, un-sidewalked ground.

All the air seemed to come out of Robin at once, like a bellows being depressed. His eyes registered hunger at the sight of the shoe.

"It is being noised about among locals that a fishing boat was seen, uncaptained, caught in The Great Russel being swept toward the coast of Herm."

"Where did you find it?" Robin's eyes looked at the shoe in wonder, as an archeologist might the Rosetta Stone.

"One of the many caves. No one is there any longer, but I think together we may well track them..."

"You lead, my friend," said Robin, chuffed at the discovery by his best mate. "Mine is but to follow." His heart felt better than it had in days. He looked up. There were still several stars yet visible in the pre-dawn. He began to quote to himself, " _When the blazing sun is gone/When he nothing shines upon/Then you show your little light/Twinkle, twinkle, all the night/When the traveller in the dark/Thanks you for your tiny spark/He could not see which way to go/If you did not twinkle so_."

 _Twinkle, Marion_ , he willed with his mind.  _You have ever been my compass, my pole star. Now, twinkle! I am coming, my love!_

And as he set off after Mitch he laughed, knowing that unlike Cinderella's bewildered Prince, he had no doubts as to which maiden this shoe would fit.

**...TBC...**

 

* * *


	16. Chapter 16

**Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -**  Communications Officer Wills Reddy, having been tasked for the time being to stay at the farm and work, lest Marion or the flier show up, saw  _them_  (an attachment of men, Gisbonnhoffer at their head) coming. But could do nothing about it, having, of necessity, to hide himself at the first sign of German troops on the property.

Blind La Salle, for the moment indoors, of course, did not (see them, nor have to hide himself).

Heavy-handed pounding on the never-used-since-Louise-had-evacuated front door was his first indication that all was not well. The sound was one to stop the heart, one that left no doubt in one's mind as to its maker's intentions. As if to further punctuate their point, one of Louise's grandmother's framed needlepoints (a charming one of local wildflowers) fell from the wall by the doorframe, its glass shattering into shards on the floor below.

Stephen was within feet of answering the door when the Germans stopped pounding and simply entered. He had no chance to find or collect the broken frame and its precious antique embroidered fabric before it became, shortly, ground into the floorboards by unwelcome German jackboots.

Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer did not bother to introduce himself, nor did he immediately speak to the man he knew (from neighboring farmers' descriptions) to be Blind La Salle. "You may drop it," he told his men, gesturing to the floor, "just there." The spot he indicated was well onto the farmhouse's second best rug on the floor of the front sitting room, the first room to the left (through a modest arch) when entering the house through the front door.

Stephen was still where he had stopped when they entered, at the spot where the narrow hall ended and the modest entryway began. His ears failed him. In the flurry of activity he could not immediately tell the number of soldiers now over-running his house, nor understand from any of his senses what it was they were ordered to drop. He recognized no voices, was given no introductions to anyone. Not even the man in command.

"You are Stephen La Salle?" Geis asked, pointlessly, it being clear the man before him was blind. "Who holds a seat on Chief Pleas, and is tenant to this farm?"

Stephen's mouth hung open a bit in his ongoing disorientation. "I am."

"And your sworn loyalty to your King George, proving difficult of late?" The German did not wait for Stephen to reply. "And  _this_  man," Geis gestured to what his men had deposited in a soaking wet heap on the floor, toeing the corpse's shoulder with his boot toe, "is he whom you would claim as your man to offer up in  _defense_  of your island?" He smirked. His voice altered with the skewed expression.

At first, not understanding, Stephen searched, all his intellect looking for a diplomatic way to answer such a powder keg of a question, "it is...so, according to island law. Wait-Dick is with you?" He called to the young man to answer his name. He had not sensed him here. "Dick?"

"Then you had better find another." Gisbonnhoffer nodded his head to a handful of men, who began at this signal to search the house.

Stephen's heightened levels of perception strained to comprehend what was being practiced on him, on his home. "What has happened? Dick?"

Gisbonnhoffer noted to himself, feeling sly, that a man who could not even detect a corpse at his feet was surely no one to fear as an initiator of resistance, much less insurrection. "Your neighbors claim this man as Dick Giddons, your hired hand. This is true?"

Stephen went down on his knee. From this position he felt around until he located the sodden, lifeless body of his employee, and friend, his hands instinctively going to the young man's face, understandably cold, its features locked in an unfamiliar rictus. "How has this happened?" he asked, his emotions (though in check), the sorrow of his newborn grief making his speech slower than usual.

"I might ask you the same question." No reason to let this blind man know that in his disability he had already been counted off the list of suspects in the escape. "Certainly that is why we are all here." Geis' eyes shot to Diefortner, wondering where the ever-present notebook had disappeared to in this (seemingly, to him, important) moment.

"I do not know." Stephen set out not to lie ( _How had this happened-Dick's being dead? He did not know_ ). "I have not seen him for days."  _Again, true_.

"So you had noted his absence."

"Certainly, certainly."

"Yet you reported it to no one? Not your friends or neighbors, or...the authorities?"

"I am not one for travel. Certainly not on my own."  _Again, true_. He rarely went to the shopping street, and never alone. "Dick was my strong arm for such needs." His voice caught in his throat. "There was a girl...he was fond of, several tenements over."  _Jennie-who would tell Jennie?_  "He had strayed there in the past when he did not immediately return from fishing on the boat."

"It would appear he had strayed much farther afield." Geis waited for any response.

One of the ransacking soldiers returned, holding Stephen's Braille Bible. Gisbonnhoffer took it from him, even in his own atheism knowing the value of such to this man. "I am told you were a local rector until your eyesight failed you."

The change in tack away from the subject of Dick gave Stephen pause, but he answered without commenting on it. "Yes, that is true."

"And in your retirement do you maintain your rights to perform religious sacraments...Communion, Baptism?"

"Yes."

"Then I may soon have work for you, if you are able to preside over marriages."

Stephen's brow furrowed before he could stop it. This unknown-to-him German officer wishing to speak of marriage, the joining of two lives, over the desecrated body of an islander who should be receiving his own rite of respectful treatment presaging Christian burial. Again, he answered as though he had not noticed. "Certainly, if there are no impediments to the joining of the bride and groom."

"There are not." The answer was short, and the speaking of it curt.

"And likewise for your fiancee, Sir?"

"None," agreed Gisbonnhoffer, and though in  _this_  he did not lie (certainly by his own limited understanding of Marion's romantic situation), there was  _something_  in his tone, in the very breath that expelled from his lungs to give the words sound and meaning, in the very bringing of them into existence that Stephen understood there to be a darkness, an appalling disconnect with decency, a detachment from genuine integrity.

"No," Stephen's voice became ghostly, though he did not know what such a turning down of this man might bring about. He spoke slowly. "I find I must decline the honor, after all."

Geis cocked his head to one side, curious at the change in the prevailing winds of their conversation. "And why? I can pay for your services. Even see to it, if you like, that Mr. Giddons, here, is respectfully laid to rest before day's end. Why refuse my request?" And here his tone was edged with danger. "It was courteously offered."

Again, Stephen had purposed not to lie, even under such duress. Though perhaps it would have been best had he held his silence. "There is something...in your voice, when you spoke, when you...denied the existence of impediments..."

The Lieutenant's head cocked further. "What?"

"In your voice, I heard..."

"You  _heard_?" Geis asked, harshly. Then crisply, he turned and demanded of one of his men, "Your sidearm, Private. Now." He accepted the Private's handgun, and withdrew his own, a pistol in each of his fists. He took two steps toward the blind rector, who still knelt at the body of his hired man. Extending his arms, he placed a standard issue 9mm pistol to each side of Blind La Salle's head, the chamber of each gun snugly up against La Salle's ears, barrels aimed into the lower plaster wall beyond. "It is best in such times, Rector, to be wary of what one might hear. You will do well to remember that." He squeezed both triggers in tandem, so that Stephen La Salle could not have said which explosive report burst which of his eardrums first.

Immediately, through the shock and pain, Stephen began to recite the Lord's Prayer, his voice ragged with stress and uncertainty, his French ringing out from room-to-room, but unlikely to be heard outside the walls of his home, the anatomy of his inner ears so violently damaged Stephen could not even hear himself.

Gisbonnhoffer's nose wrinkled at this unexpected response to his lashing out. "What is he  _doing_?" His outrage was doubled by his confusion.

"It would appear," Diefortner volunteered, his curiosity undimmed by the cruelty on display before him, "that he is invoking ' _Clameur de Haro_ '."

Gisbonnhoffer's eyes registered no recognition with the French phrase.

" _Haro, Haro, Haro!_ " cried Stephen, even as he wept, " _A mon aide mon Prince, on me fait tort!_ "

Diefortner continued. "Part of the ancient Norman law of the islands. It is a legal device, with which a person can obtain immediate cessation of any action he considers to be in infringement of his rights."

Gisbonnhoffer's eye narrowed as he thought. "And what does it mean for us?"

"Legally, all actions against the person in question must then cease until the matter is heard by the island Court." Diefortner paused to plant the depraved notion into Geis' still-churning psyche. "Of course, one must have  _witnesses_  to the  _Clameur_  for it to be legally viable..."

That was all it took for the Lieutenant. He was done with this place, with this man. Done, and ready to pursue what he expected were truer leads as to the location of the flier and Marion. He was frustrated on two accounts: one, that following the fisherman's body had not resulted in furthering their search; two, that this worm of a rector would not agree to (unwittingly) join in his nefarious (though he, himself, did not think of it that way) plan to take Marion for his wife once she was found. "Take the Bible," Gisbonnhoffer barked at his men, thrusting the heavy Braille volume at them. "Toss it into the kitchen stove's firebox.  _Well into_. At least that way it will do some good, warming this damp, ramshackle..." he looked down to the bootless corpse that had been his deliquescing companion for most of the day, "abattoir."

His  _Clameur_  said, his concentration (through his discomfort, through his woe and disappointment) now firmly on the departed loved one at his side, who had given all to defeat, even in a small way, these German occupiers, Blind La Salle could not hear them retreat. Could barely spare thought to notice their jackboots setting the wooden floor to shudder under their step. His world, ever dark, had fallen silent, solitary.

**...TBC...**


	17. Chapter 17

**NW Sark - ruins of 6th Century medieval monastery -**  She looked at him. She thought it was time, that he would kill her.

He looked at her. He thought that it was time, that he would let her go.

The Gypsy looked at a small pile of kindling, which she had gathered and placed up against a stone corner of the ruin, and hoped that she could get it to light. Hoped that the flier would not interfere with her labor, not disagree with a small fire when the aging day was still light enough to keep its glow unremarkable. Warmth right now would feel good.

She withdrew a small flint-like device that she wore on a leather strap around her neck. One of a mounting number of useful things Carter had noted, with some surprise (after all, only some hours ago Djak had been in a prison camp) of which the Gypsy seemed to be inexplicably in possession.

The trio was within easy sight of an exquisite manor of Jersey stone, the most elaborate dwelling on the island entire. Built in the Jersey-style of four front windows downstairs, and five above, it had been built on the ruin of the 6th century priory of St. Magloire, of which only a tall enclosure wall and this small portion of the west wall of the chapel yet stood. Carter did not know it for what it was, La Seigneurie, home of the island's civilian head of government, Dame Sibyl Hathaway, its bell tower and famous walled gardens making it unmistakable to any channel islander.

It seemed sensible to him that he would re-truss the woman's ankles and remove her gag. (Her wrists already bound.) Within an hour or so (when he and the Gypsy could be well-gone from this locale) someone would need to come out of the impressive house and see to end-of-day chores. They were sure to hear the woman's cries for help.

He was beginning to second-guess himself, to think that he should have gone ashore on another island (one of the smaller inhabited ones nearby, for example) and put her out of the boat hours, a night, ago. Then he would not have this potential millstone about his neck.

Well, at the least perhaps he might put some fear into her before they departed, assuring himself she would be too apprehensive to say or recall much about where her abductor had gone, or how she had come to be here.

 

* * *

Marion felt...not much. Vaguely she noticed that she was hungry. It had been more than a whole day since she had eaten. She wondered how long it had been for the Gypsy, for the flier. She thought of the sandwich Dick had shown her he was leaving for the flier to eat, once they were away from Alderney on the boat. How Dick had pointed out that his employer, La Salle, had made certain to send some of his precious-in-these-times beef to try and feed the sure-to-be weak blood of this Thomas Carter, who they had all known had been mistreated and deprived of much since his bailing-out and capture some weeks ago.

 _Where_ , Marion wondered, trying not to think any further on the young Giddons,  _was that sandwich now?_

She thought of dying at the hands of this misinformed RAF Flight Commander. She thought of last meals. Of the cream and cheese of a Lobster Thurmidor-never as exquisite in their formal Mayfair dining room as it was here, close to the sea, the local dairy providing freshest cream and Guernsey-made cheese, the salt air seeming to season the dish to a level of near-divinity. Of Tomato Aspic, as her mother oversaw its creation, its painstakingly careful moulding (and mould-removal) done as Cook took Lady Nighten's expert direction. And the fried dough of a Jersey Wonder, as she had enjoyed, still hot, from Eva's mother's kitchen.

Marion saw the flier stand, the knife blade twinkling in the dying sun, in the Gypsy's beginning flames of a modest fire. She thought to say a prayer of contrition, certain the moment had come that he would finish her off. She thought to ask for forgiveness on the flier's behalf. She thought to remind herself she wished him no ill will. But then instead her thoughts turned to the Nightwatch, of how it would now be silent. Of how she could no longer hear music, as though her passion for it had, in these final moments, deserted her.

He took a step toward her.

 **England - 1939 - Kirk Leaves, the Country Estate of Earl Huntingdon -**  There were to be no bodies returned, the families had been informed. The British Government and military had already seen to them. To what the accident had left of them. In this, Lady Nighten had said, the families were asked to consent, and so, had.

It was the Earl who had offered up Kirk Leaves as a place to hold what would stand for Robin's and Mitch Bonchurch's joint funeral. The other families of the remaining 'Saintly Six', as the newspapers were now calling them, would see to their own losses, in their own ways.

Marion had wandered into the barns. Without meaning to, she found herself at the now-empty stall where Saracen's Beau had been foaled. She could tell from the sounds out on the lawn that the outdoor service was not yet ready to begin. She looked around her, unable to process what she had meant to do in coming here-both to the barn, and back to Britain. She felt herself of no visible utility. She was unable to concentrate on anything, her mind a cluttered mess that seemed to have lost the ability to formulate the important connections that seemed so key for effective people to constantly make.

Through the stall's opening to the outside she could see her mother, beyond, on the lawn, working her special brand of social magic.  _Now there_ , Marion thought,  _was an effective person. There was a woman who got things done. What a disappointment I must be. Soggy, depressed, lost, and now without the shiny, bright fiance loved by so many_. She felt like a once-lovely layer cake with a piece stolen from it before it had yet been presented as entire to the anticipated company for tea.

An incongruous-in-a-barn noise coming from behind her caught her attention, and she turned. "Your lordship," she said to the Earl, who was standing there.

"Marion," he said, as if simply stating who she was. He was a handsome man, the Earl, his features somewhat less roughened than his sons, no doubt due to less fast-living. He was younger than her father, perhaps by more than twenty years. His eyes were dark, but kind, not blue and boldly fanciful as were his sons, his wifes.

She could not recall Countess Huntingdon at all as a living person, only as a distant figure in several strikingly beautiful portraits that hung in the Manor. Lady Nighten had pointed out to her, on several occasions, that the Countess likeness had been, perhaps, somewhat idealized by the artists. It was her essence, she had counseled Marion,  _that_  was what left men thinking she was beautiful. They were so taken by her jolly, delightful manner they could not have accurately described her features or form even for a convened court of law. This concept seemed to have impressed her mother.

Marions mind slowly registered that it seemed that the Earl had been crying. His face was drawn, far more sober even, than usual. In this un-electrified section of the barn it was hard to be certain. The notion of the Earl of Huntingdon, stiff upper lip and all that weeping was a hard one to process. Though she did recall they were not, strictly speaking, in public. Perhaps she had transgressed on his privacy. She turned to go.

"How are you, Marion," he asked, his voice sounding of a fullness, as before a cough or wheeze.

"Sir?" she asked, perplexed at how to answer such a question, her mind still sluggish at connections.

"I was wrong, you know." He did not wait for her to ask in what way, or to answer. "He should have married you straight away. He held his place some small distance from her, perhaps the length of a small room. I said some dratted foolish things. Though they didn't seem foolish at the time. I told him that I didn't approve, on the grounds that you were too good for him." He smiled at her. "Well, I daresay I was damned wrong, there.  _Nothing_  should have been too good for him. Not you, not the Princess Elizabeth herself." The facial compression of his smile seemed determined to squeeze water from his eyes. "What's a little happiness, really, when he gave us so much in just being himself?"

"I dont know if I can stay," Marion told him, uncertain as to whether she would be able to hold up throughout the service and receiving line to come. She was not doing a very publicly acceptable job at present of holding herself together as she saw him here, this powerful man, important in government, respected, sometime advisor to Downing Street, to the King himself, battling against shedding tears for his dead son. No. She would  _not_  think of him as Robins father. Not as her prospective father-in-law, her future family.

"I received a bill," the Earl began, looking at her but ignoring her statement of uncertainty and withdrawal, her desire to depart the estate and services. "Only arrived this week." He pulled the invoice out of his mourning suitcoat's inside breast pocket, the spot closest to his heart. "Seems my ridiculous son could not reconcile himself to what tailoring the Royal Army could provide to him. He'd taken his uniforms and all his shirts to Jermyn Street, to Turnbull & Asser, for a proper fitting."

She looked at him, in a rare (recent) moment of her brain connecting two thoughts, she thought ironically that they could not even bury Robin in his after-the-fact bespoke uniform.

"We must go join the others, now, Child." The Earl snuffled and responded to the music changing as it signaled the service's opening with an intake of breath, settling back into the man she better knew.

But Marion found she could not hear, could not any longer understand the music about her anymore, in this time. It all sounded of cacophony, and offered none of the succor, joy or comfort it always had.

She had not unpacked a single record she had brought with her across the Atlantic. Spun not a single one on a turntable. She occupied rooms that likewise held radios, and left them to sit completely silent.

 

* * *

Here she was, years later, Robin alive, but the music had again gone silent. Then, like the setting of a needle into the groove, like depressing the transmit button she used on the Nightwatch microphone, it came to her, pleading, regretful; " _Please don't play that old song/It means too much to me/Please don't play that old song/It haunts my memory_."

The fisherman's knife was in the flier's hand.

" _Not so long ago I shared a love affair/Every night we dined and danced/And heard that tune everywhere_."

The boots he wore, Dick Giddons' boots, came closer to where she sat.

" _Once we sang those lyrics/With every band that played/Now it doesn't sound like..._ " She felt the music crescendo. " _A lover's serenade/Now the song is over/Like the love that used to be..._ "

The flier took his free hand, reached it into her mouth and withdrew the swastika gag.

" _Please don't play that old song...for me_."

As before, when the Gypsy had done so, the coughing reflex was immediate.

Marion would never know  _why_  she said what came next. Never, years later, even, be able to explain why  _that_  was the speech that chose to leap off her tongue. She only believed that whatever impetus there had been that prompted it (the head injury, the reverie, the song feeling like it was playing on the Nightwatch), to  _that_  she would always owe her life.

Before she even realized she had gotten control of the coughing, she let out with a tart, "Slap the dog and spit in the fire!" so spot-on Josie Otto that Fred's own family could not have told the difference between Marion and their youngest sister.

The flier jumped away from her as though he had been unexpectedly scalded. His eyes, though narrow when at rest, grew round with shock and astonishment.

In response to her own verbose reaction, Marion clamped her mouth shut tightly. The voice of the Nightwatch was not for public consumption when her face could be seen, and thereby connected to it. She felt she had made a huge gaffe.

 

* * *

In response to the indecipherable scene that had played out before her, the Gypsy tore her attention away from her fire and demanded to know of the flier, "what have you done?"

In English, the flier breathily echoed her words, "what have I done?" His eyes looked at the ungagged woman before him, but he did not see her as she was, he saw, instead, a small closet space converted into a cell, dark, even when it was not late night. He heard Billie Holiday singing on a Nazi radio. He heard the voice of the Nightwatch, that which represented all he knew of resistance, of righteousness on these islands, announce the songs, recap the BBC news. Heard that voice blatantly defy the Jerries simply by pressing a 'transmit' button. A voice that was more than welcome on those nights, something from home. The very voice that had just come out of this woman.

This woman, whom he had debased for all to see by shearing her hair. This woman he had injured willfully. This woman he had made his prisoner, whom he had treated harshly, unkindly...

_What had he done?_

 

* * *

 **Sark - nearby -**  Mitch Bonchurch was not quite a quarter-mile in advance of Robin, but nearly that when he smelled the smoke on the wind. Because he had been to this spot earlier in his search, he knew some ruins (welcoming to anyone needing to hide) could be found shortly ahead, nearby La Seigneurie's gardens, on the lands still referred to by locals as, 'La Moinerie'. As the day had lengthened into afternoon, and was now coming up on early evening, he knew their time for tracking the escaped flier was running out.

He did not stint in his dash back toward Robin, his friend and commanding officer, to tell him that they were near, Lady Marion all-but within sight.

 

* * *

 **Farm of Blind La Salle -**  Wills sat in his snug (over-snug, really) hiding place, wishing for a smoke, or a breath not tainted by manure. Served him right, after all, the 'shit shack' had been his idea.

It was a small space, able to hold two men seated, and little else (and heaven help you, Soldier, if you wound up needing to share it with the bulk that was John).

A tiny box shack, more of a shed, its exterior wood heavily shellacked against the eroding power of the deep manure and barnyard offal that covered it where it sat against the wall of the largest of La Salle's barns.

A manure pile: something entirely normal on a farm, growing ever-larger, something that no one relished venturing near, certainly not spit-shine German troops without a  _very_  compelling reason to do so.

Wills had fashioned an old stovepipe to vent the space, providing enough air to breathe, but only just, and air of an odious quality so pungent one's lungs often refused to register it as breathable at all.

No smoking within the shack; the very material that so well shielded against anyone wishing to look further in it (or under it) also being of the flammable variety. A jug of water was kept within, but to-date no one had gotten to the level of desperation that they had drunk from it, sure to be dung-tainted as well, if only in its taste.

Day by day as they worked the farm, always at least one of the gang present these last few weeks, more and more manure had built up on top the drop-flap door, and though it was a repugnant place to contemplate spending much time in, Wills found his heart had felt good as he had crawled in, pulling the prop-stick out from the drop-flap door, and heard the plop of soft muck that would conceal his entrance.

He had had some time today to sit here alone and wonder what his deceased father might have thought of such an enterprise, thought of his son being the initiator of such.

Daniel Reddy was a tradesman, respectable, successful proprietor of several furniture factories back home. Proud member of the nascent British middle class. Over the years Wills had feared his father's love of the crafting of wood had evaporated in light of the ever-present concerns of sales and profits and shareholders. They were not an affluent family, to be sure (unlike Robin he was no viscount, an earldom in his future), but they were solid and well-off. The assumption had been that Wills and his brother, Luke, would follow their father into factory management, allowing the family's business to multiply even further and be taken back from the hands of their father's surviving business partners.

His grandfather, Daniel Sr., now,  _he_  had been the artisan of the family. He had been the man with the hands, the master cabinetmaker whose in-demand handmade furniture had paved the way for his father's assembly line achievements.

Wills was briefly lost in this reverie when he heard shots fired. There were two, he thought, barely separated one from the other, as though almost a firing squad volley. Here ended his contemplation on paternal approval. No longer did he notice or bemoan the smell about him. Grimly clenching his jaw, he consulted his military-issue wristwatch and began his wait to come out: either someone from among the unit would come to get him, or, at nightfall, if he heard nothing else, he would himself emerge.

Until then, thoughts of his grandfather, and the heat of the steaming (even in October) pile that surrounded him, were all he had to keep him warm.

 

* * *

 **NW Sark - ruins of 6th Century medieval monastery -**  Thomas Carter placed his hands on either side of this woman's, this blessed woman's, neck, his thumbs coming up to her jaw and lower cheeks. The intensity with which he spoke might have been mis-interpreted as threatening, so overcome was he with self-repulsion at what he might have done. The costly mistake he had nearly blundered into. His mind balked at how to reconcile with, how to make amends to, this woman, his unjustly battered prisoner.

Her quick, perceptive eyes looked at him with what he knew was a mixture of relief and mistrust.  _What was he going to do next?_  she would wonder, probably more than a little frozen with suspicious hesitation.

 _Yes_ , he too-well knew the emotions of being captive to someone. His heart-what was left of it-dropped a beat at knowing itself for her captor. "I have taken something-several things-from you. Unjustly. That was wrong. Formally, I apologize, with deepest regret." He was on his knees to be at her eye level. "I did not understand who you were. Informally, I tell you this: I will share with you something of  _my_ self, as I have taken, without good cause, something of  _your_ self. It is something no other person on this side of the world knows, not my commanding officers, not my acquaintances, not the Germans who most-recently interrogated me. That is how precious this is to me, how deeply held within me."

He raised his eyebrows in a question to see if she understood. "I have a daughter. Her name is Zara. She is four years old, and I have never met her."

Marion found herself so taken aback by his behavior she did not feel immediate pressure to fully clarify their situation. Instead, she asked, "Never met her?"

"She lives with my mother, and her great-grandmother, in America. I suppose it would seem surprising to you, as a woman, that you might have a child and not know it. Zara was born after I had left to fight. Her mother died in birth."

"And you loved her mother? Yet she never told you a child was coming?"

He did not immediately reply to the question of love, settling instead on truth; "I would have married her, had she told me, had I not been already deployed."

"But you will meet her, Zara, of course, go home to her when...all this is over?"

His eyes narrowed further at this. "Will it ever be over? Will we live through it, do you think?" He jerked his head over to indicate the Gypsy, still fire-tending. " _He_  thinks so. That is why he runs, though he knows his skin cannot be well-hidden on these islands."

The way he referenced the Gypsy confused her. " _He_?"

"The Gypsy boy."

 _Ah_ , Marion thought. She had no reason to unmask the Gypsy as a girl. That was the Gypsy's business, how she wished to live in such times.  _Smart to switch gender, though. Safer, anyway. Until one was found out._

"His eyes," Thomas Carter was saying, "you can see it in there: he will die if he is caged again. His soul no longer has any vigor left for it. He would rather die free than endure a camp any longer." Carter bent his head to the clumsy-with-so-large-a-knife task of slicing through her wrists' binding.

 

* * *

This was what he saw: Marion. The flier. A boy tending a small fire.

This was what he saw: Marion. Her hair shorn like a German's prisoner, wild in its undoing, in its response to the elements: wind and humidity. Her neck, some blood crusted on it from the day-old trauma to the base of her skull. Her face, half of it swollen with a bruise, cut from her fall into the cave wall. Her lips: dried, broken open and split from the gag she had long-worn. Her feet: bare. Her hands: bound. Her dress: entirely ill-suited to travel, much less the October weather, in utter disrepair.

This is what he saw: The blonde man (the flier?  _Could_  it be the flier?) threatening her, raising a knife (a large knife) to Marion.

This is what he did: rush in to kill him.

**...TBC...**


	18. Chapter 18

**Sark - just beyond ruins of 6th Century medieval monastery -**  After his quarter-mile sprint over uneven terrain to get Robin, Mitch had let himself lag behind in his return to the ruins. He was not (as he usually was) alongside Robin when his senior officer, Oxley, came into view of the flier and Marion, nor did Bonchurch have any idea (not having actually sited the party of three) of the state of things which further served to rattle Robin's at-present tightly-wound disposition.

 **Sark - ruins of 6th Century medieval monastery -**  There was no banter, no warning of the attack, nothing said nor shouted, as though Robin, heir to the earldom of Huntingdon, officer in His Majesty's Army, was beyond words, left only with violent action, as though he had abandoned human speech and turned feral.

Marion perhaps saw him first, his approach to the back of Thomas Carter.

In that brief millisecond of recognition her heart tried to propel her forward, toward him, so glad at the sight, the knowledge, of him, especially coming so close on the heels of her realizing the flier was not going to kill her after all.

But almost instantly what she saw frightened her. Robin lunged at the flier, and began a vicious wrestle-and-battering struggle for the fisherman's knife. Taken unawares by his unknown assailant, the flier fought tooth-and-nail to maintain control of it.

Marion tried to call out to Robin, to the flier, even, and found her voice gone, her throat unwilling to cooperate after the prior hours of mis-use and ill-treatment.

As they thrashed and fought, falling over onto and into the still-standing rock, and ground-littering rock of the ruin, Marion saw coming out of Robin, enveloping him, obscuring the man she knew, a dangerous dog of rage unlike anything she had ever encountered in him before. It reminded her of something she often saw held at bay in Geis' eyes. Something she had perceived within the deep corners of the flier's as well.

_Did he always have this, this churning wildfire of violence within him? A capacity for aggression and brutality? Had the Army cultivated this? Is that what an Army was meant to do, to find this element, this basic viciousness in each man, harness and nurture it for their purposes?_

She knew he was a soldier. Knew, she supposed, that Robin had killed, had taken lives. For England, for Right, for their shared Cause. But this, this attack of the flier, it was on her account. On her account that this rabid dog of-of what? Defense of her? Protection of her? It did not flatter her to know this was due to her, that something about her could in him spark such a torrent of ferocity without thought, without examination of the situation, or reflection on the possible repercussions. It did  _not_  flatter her. It caused her to shiver, as though, Fred Otto would say, someone had walked across her grave.

The fisherman's knife had been lost to both in the brawl, new blood from cuts sprouting on the face and bared skin of each man as they fought on. Marion noticed that the flier did not ask what was going on, did not attempt to discern why he was being attacked. Made no noise, in fact, other than his efficient breathing.

She looked to the Gypsy, who had moved quickly to retrieve the knife from where it had fallen away from the two. Marion knew what she had to do. Certainly she did not have to worry any longer about mussing her hair or soiling her dress. She threw herself into the fight, determined to interpose herself between the two men, both suffering from an overabundance of misunderstandings, and, it would seem, unsatiated bloodlust.

Her plan proved easier in thought than in implementation. She could not seem to get them apart, both men reaching the moment as in a boxing match where the two combatants are too close to even launch or land proper blows on their opponent.

She had no strength to push, yet she pushed, she scrabbled, she dug and groped until she was between them, her back to the flier.

"Stop this!" she cried, her voice still largely hoarse. Her command came out as a honking squawk.

She noticed the Gypsy was now standing behind Robin, fisherman's knife nowhere visible. Marion wondered if Robin was wearing a pistol, why he had not taken it out to use, if she needed to be worried he might.

She felt the flier's chest rise and fall heavily into her back, as she was hard-pressed against him, feeling like a Pocahontas in the story where she plead for John Smith's life.

"Robin," she began, not knowing how best to bring him back from the haze of fury he was under. Certainly his eyes seemed to tell her that she did not have time for a thorough explanation of circumstances. "Do not do this. Do not taint us with..."

His eyes broadened, but wildly, and not enough that she even felt fully confident that he recognized her.

"If you love me," she said, taking the chance, not daring, even, to touch him, to reach out to him. "If you trust  _me_ , you will not do this."

"I..." he spoke. Though he did as one might to a young child who does not understand the concept an adult was explaining. His brow furrowed in deliberation. "It is because I love you that I do this. I do  _love_ you, Marion," he said, but his breathing and his demeanor did not alter enough to assure her he was out of the woods yet, and not simply using this moment to catch his breath and his second wind.

From behind him the Gypsy girl signaled to Marion that she had an idea, and Marion gave the slightest nod, and with two fingers to some arcanely-known pressure point of Robin's, Djak dropped him to the ground, unconscious.

Marion felt the flier at her back exhale, but warily. Quickly she turned to confront him. Her voice was lower in register than usual, but returning to functionality. "You, step back, away from him. As I say, now."

He followed her order without question.

"Find out from the Gypsy how long until he wakes up from what she has done to him."

Carter spoke the question. "'Minutes,' he says. His name is Djak, by the way," he added, trying to get used to the woman before him, the woman no longer speaking in the voice of the Nightwatch.

She pointed to Robin. "Take a good look at him, Flight Commander Thomas Carter..."

The flier flinched at her unexpected use of his name and rank-he had still not been informed of all that had transpired to bring them to this point in his escape.

"This is the man that plotted your escape. The man who worked with people inside the Treeton Camp to affect your liberation. The man that sent you me, that sent you La Salle's precious boat. To him you owe your current freedom." She shook her head circumspectly. "Do not hold against him that he erroneously thought you were set to take from me mine."

Marion heard a rustling in the nearby brush, which proved to be a fashionably late Bonchurch. At the sight of her he balked. Something about his expression made her want to swoon, reminded her of how exhausted, of how strained her muscles and emotions were. She looked away from him. "Mitch," she spoke to him as Robin might, forthrightly and with authority. "This is Thomas Carter, and Djak," she extended a hand toward the Gypsy. "I think it best you take them onto wherever you have in your plans for them. Quickly, before Robin rouses. It would seem I have much to explain to him, and all things considered," she looked to the Gypsy, thinking of the fisherman's knife, and wondering, on the girl's sparse set of clothes, where she had put it, "you ought go straightaway."

Carter looked to her as though he might attempt to further apologize, but she shook her head. "If we should not meet again, please know: you had my forgiveness before I had your apology." Her eyebrows lifted. "This war has made fools and idiots of us all in many ways," she let her eyes stray to the mistaken Robin, not yet stirring, in the grass at her feet, "so long as it all comes to good in the end, let us not worry ourselves about it overmuch."

"Lady Marion," Mitch looked at her anxiously, "you are well enough? You appear far from-" he stole a fretful look at the flier, not sure who to finger for her damaged appearance, "alright."

She did not answer him, letting what she had said earlier stand. She asked the flier to tell Djak 'thank you' for her help. He did so, and the Gypsy gave her a crisp nod in reply before the new trio of Carter, Bonchurch and Djak set out over the countryside to whatever safety Robin and his unit had planned for them.

 

* * *

They were not long out-of-sight when Robin began to stir. She did not wait for him to rise up onto his elbow, even, before she took him to task. "Why would you try to kill a man it just cost you so much to liberate? What sort of hazy-headed thinking is that?"

Robin looked befuddled, more than just by the unexpected loss of consciousness. "Marion, are you alright?" he asked, intently. "Your face, your neck," he attempted to move closer and inspect the base of her skull where she had been coshed.

She rattled on, a steam train that had lost its breaks. Where before she shook with fear at him, at his ferocious arrival, now she shook with outrage. "You couldn't have just asked that when you found us? Instead you had to go ballistic, red-eyed with rage and...berserker?"

In the wake of her familiar-to-him scolding his aggression evaporated into pure concern over her condition. "What are you doing out here without a coat? Without shoes?" He looked around for the others, "Mitch found one of your shoes, suppose he's got it-where have they all torn off to?"

She ignored his questions, her dressing-him-down bordering on momentary mania. "It is insensible to rush in without all the facts. That's how it happened on Guernsey, you know. The Germans were so sure the lorries lining the harbor at St. Peter Port were carrying British troops (because no one in government had bothered to tell them the islands had been demilitarized) that they launched an air attack on us.  _Over lorries!_  Carrying tomatoes for export! Their bombs killed scores islanders, you know. Over tomatoes!"

Robin's right eye pinched together slightly at the corner, as he worked to suss out the cause of her intense lecture. "Marion," his voice was calm, eminently reasonable. "I thought he was hurting you. Wasn't he hurting you? If-If not, who did this?"

She harrumphed. "Well of course he was hurting me-did you think it was the Gypsy? But he wasn't  _anymore_." Her voice made a sound on that word almost like a cry. "We were doing just fine when you showed up and," she began to blubber. But not a sniffle or an elegant stage actor's cry. Her tears stormed and wracked her, her chest unable to contract and expand far enough to accommodate the emotion enshrined within it. But still, behind all that, the indignation. "Oh, how you frightened me!" She fell down onto her knees, beside him.

He lifted his eyebrows, in patient questioning. "Because it took me so long to come? So long to find you? I  _have_  searched, even on Guernsey..."

"No!" Had she been another type of woman she would have landed a punch on his shoulder, or pounded her fists into his chest in frustration-fueled impotence. She did not. "Because I looked at you and...you were going to kill him. I didn't know if I could...stop you. If you were too much in a killing fever to listen to me. It...it was like you might not even-recognize me."

His lips came together in a thin line. He had not words to respond to her (probably astute) accusation. He could see that she was not at all herself. She was a wreck. She was coming undone, in a flash-flood torrent before his eyes. He did not know what the last hours had held for her, he did not think that her castigation of him was without merit. But like anyone trying to process extended trauma, he could see that she needed calm, and comfort, not a verbal sparring partner, no matter how much she, at present, thought she did. "Let me see your feet," he said, lifting them into his lap with great care. His inspection was brief. "You are too far gone, I fear, to benefit from putting on my boots. They will do more damage than good. Can you walk?"

Her reply was that of a truculent child. "I don't want to walk."

"And why not?"

The force of her speech had abandoned her. As had her high-handedness. "Don't take me back yet, Robin. Don't make me leave you." The next bit sounded almost sleepy. "I am tired of leaving you. Tired of...tired."

He took off his hearty woolen jumper (all he would have needed against the October chill even out on the water) and pulled it as gently as possible over her head, leaving himself just the buttoned coat for his warmth. He could not stop himself before he again referenced how she looked, the addition of the oversized jumper further degrading her appearance. "Look at what he's done to you. What has happened?" He stood, offering her his hand.

"He took me for a Jerry-bag. Gisbonnhoffer's."

"I will kill him," he said, a sharpness creeping back into his tone.

At that, some vinegar returned to hers. "Did you not do the same, that night of the engagement party?"

"I said I did. But...I never truly believed it."

"Didn't you?" She challenged him, though faintly.

"Well, not from the moment I looked at you." He thought of the moment Allen and John had brought her through the maze, blindfolded, stood her up before him. The passage of five years weighing heavy in that instant. The possibility of betrayal of King, of Country...of him, weighing heavier. "Not once I saw into your eyes. I knew then there was more to it."

"He gagged me immediately, so I could tell him nothing."

Robin's planner mind proceeded to the next step. "Then how did you two find your way to La Salle's boat?"

"I was unconscious at the time." She felt (her hands now unbound) the base of her skull for the first time, the crust of blood, like dried paste, in what was left of her hair. "Dick is dead."

"What? He did not stay behind as part of the 'stolen boat' ruse?"

"I didn't see it, but it would seem the flier shot him."

Robin replied with a noise of outrage that was not truly of any language, save frustration and foiled plans. "We've lost a good man, and here you are hurt, in spades." He stopped himself before continuing to further decry the bungled escape. "How do  _you_  feel?"

"Terrible," she owned-up. "But my injuries sell your story really well, don't they?"

He put his fingers lightly to the unwounded side of her face. "I would far rather have a suspect cover story than you injured."

"And I," she told him, letting the truth fly like a signal flag, hiding herself to him as finished as was her captivity, "would rather have you, Robin, than anything else in this present world." She brought her hand up to his, her fingers gripping his thumb and palm.

He smiled without his teeth, smiled almost apologetically at her declaration and squeezed her fingers, only then noticing the wrist injury she wore from being bound. "Come back to La Salle's," he offered her, his mind distracted somewhat by this newest hurt to catalog. "And you may have all of me that you wish. Can you walk?"

She grunted, and tried to keep pace with his stride, telling herself every raise of her foot was closer to rest, and every minute out walking these fields was another precious moment shared with a Robin she had never thought to have again.

**...TBC...**


	19. Chapter 19

**Sark - Dixcart Hotel -**  Gisbonnhoffer walked into the dining parlor, more than a little dismayed to have to share yet another meal with Vaiser's adjutant Diefortner and his now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Domesday notebook. This location was a common billet on the island, plenty of other Germans about, mixing with the few locals lodging here that were not also employed by the hotel.

How he hated the thought of more time spent with the Underlieutenant, his failure to locate the flier and Marion weighing heavy on him without that man's silent disapproval (and, by proxy, the Kommandant's).

As he stalked through the dining parlor's maze of tables, his hip struck a seated diner in the shoulder. He looked down to see if it were necessary to offer an apology. (That is, if the person struck were both German and outranked him.) "You," he said, with surprised contempt to find Vaiser's islander driver sinking his teeth into the cheese course of a meal.

"Dale," the other man said, cheerily, as though the Lieutenant had asked his name. "Dale Allen. Kommandant's driver." He rubbed his hand on an available napkin. "I live here, Sir." He extended his wiped-clean hand for the shaking.

Gisbonnhoffer stared at it, suspectly. His eyes shifted to the opposite side of the room, where Diefortner was just beginning the soup course. "Boy!" he shouted to the young man serving at table. "I will eat  _here_."

And without taking the driver's offered hand of friendship, or politely asking leave, he seated himself authoritatively in the chair next to him, 'Dale, Dale Allen', and proceeded to go about enjoying his dinner.

 

* * *

 **Farm of Blind La Salle -**  Robin and Marion had surmounted the final turnstile, traversed the last sheep pasture. They had arrived at the barnyard of Blind La Salle's tenement.

"John," Robin shouted as soon as they were in view of the barns, "John!" he roared ill-advisedly into the coming-on night for the unit's medic. Even so, there was no immediate response.

The house beyond was unlit, though he knew that not surprising if Stephen were at home alone. Perhaps Wills, who had been left here, was not yet in from the fields, or some other distant chore. Strangely the chimney showed no smoke coming from the kitchen, the room that they entered first.

"He is blind," Robin explained the darkness to Marion, bidding her to find the kitchen matches and light a lamp for them. "Stephen?" he called cautiously into the growing dark.

Marion had the lamp lit shortly (the matches not being difficult to find).

"It is unusual for him to have let the kitchen fire go out so close to evening, and dinner." His senses began to prick. "Marion, stay behind me, with the light. Hold it high." Robin reached his hand into an all-but-invisible nook in the wall and withdrew a shotgun, methodically cocking it.

They began to step slowly through the house. She did not point out their loud arrival, nor the fact that her carrying the lamp would help any attacking enemy as much as it might help them. They were in the narrow hall (she was not sure how he could have even manipulated the gun's long barrel in that space had he had to shoot it) when they heard a noise that sent them toward an archway into a front room. Robin led with the rifle, bringing it in the room perfectly at the eye level of a man seated on the floor.

At the sight of this man, Robin lowered the gun.

The man's ginger hair tracked as dark in the shadows thrown by the lamp, his eyes opaque as coddled egg whites. "Who is there? Who has returned?" Stephen asked. "What more can you want here?" He was shouting, as he could no longer hear himself.

"Robin," said Marion, seeing it first. "His ears-they bleed!"

"Stephen," Robin began, trying to communicate to his friend. At no response he spoke louder. "Stephen! What has happened here? How long have you been-" Simultaneously he and Marion seemed to glance beyond Stephen, to what was on the carpet at the rector's feet.

"Dick," said Marion, identifying the lifeless body she never thought to encounter again.

"How did he come to be here?" Robin saw, in the shadow of the lamp Marion held, the trampled remains of the needlepoint, noted the uncharacteristic disarray of the furnishings (especially all drawers) about him.

He lay down the gun and tried to take his injured friend into his arms.

At the familiar scent of Robin, at his compassionate touch, Stephen, though he could not hear, began to speak. His speech continued loud, as his ears did not function properly to let him know how to pitch it. "It is less than an hour since they have gone. They have brought Dick home." His hand patted the chest of his dead friend. "And they have...rendered me dunny. The officer, the one with guns, he did not give his name." His tone, even in its volume showed his continued mystification at what had taken place. "He...asked about my performing marriages. When I declined to do so on his behalf...there was such a darkness, such a shadow over his motivations..." His voice trailed off.

Robin had one arm wrapped around the former rector's broad shoulders, his other hand had gone back to Marion, holding hers as Stephen found himself unable to share more of his story at the moment, and instead began again, still (to him) speaking into silence. "They have brought Dick home," he shouted. "But I cannot lift him." His breath caught as though he might be half-sobbing. "Robin, help me to lift him. His parents, his girl, Jennie. They must be told. We must bring chairs-a plank from the barn to lay him out on."

Robin took Stephen's free hand and placed it to the side of his head, where he made an exaggerated nod.

"Wait," said Stephen, still, in his ringing silence, shouting. "You are not alone? Who is with you? A woman?" Even in his wretched state, he would not suppose to guess with names, when unseen others also might be present, not party to Robin's secrets.

Robin again did an exaggerated nod for Stephen's benefit, then turned to where his hand held hers, saying, "Marion, go out, into the yard, by the dung-hill. Call for Wills. Shout ' _olly olly oxen free_ '. No questions. Just do it. Take the gun." He let go of her hand to place the shotgun in its stead.

"She is injured!" the blind rector shouted, oblivious to their conversation. "I smell blood! She will need tending, Robin!"

Robin put his hands under Stephen's arms and helped haul him up from the floor, the former rector's bones, though not of an arthritic age, stiff from sitting so long with Dick.

 

* * *

Marion made her way out toward the nearest animal barn, and the dung-hill there, as directed, shotgun crooked familiarly into her elbow like she was on a fox hunt where the vixen had already been treed, shouting ' _olly olly oxen free_ ', not sure what she thought might happen next. Certainly young Wills Reddy appearing slowly out of the muck and offal of that same dung-pile was not even close to her expectations.

He proved too distracted to offer her much in the way of an explanation when he finally stood before her. In the drama of the moment, of La Salle's condition, she had forgotten herself how she might appear to others.

"There were shots fired," Wills told her, before he was even fully crawled out of his hiding place. He offered no pleasantries at encountering her. She rather thought she might have laughed at him if he had-if circumstances had not at present seemed quite so dire.

"La Salle is inside," she told him. "His ears are bleeding, and he cannot hear us."

"It was Gisbonnhoffer. I saw him arrive." His eyes looked into her as though she were more than a little to blame in bringing her fiance to the farm.

"So it was he who returned Dick's body."

"Dick's-" Wills, oblivious to this development, stalled out at saying the word 'body', a word with such finality.

"Robin is with Stephen now. They are setting chairs to lay him out." As they were so close to the barn, she ventured, "they will need a plank."

"There is one just in here," Wills replied, for the first time seeming to register, to take in, her physical state of disarray. He did not ask for her help with the task of retrieving or carrying the plank.

Nonetheless she waited for him to fetch it before returning to the house, opened the front door for him as he held the long piece of hewn wood.

Robin and Stephen had found the necessary chairs to support the plank, and the future weight of Dick's body. Robin met them just inside the door. "He complains of ringing and rushing loudly in his ears. I still cannot make him understand me."

"But that is a good thing," Wills' voice took on a note of cheer. "Burst my eardrum as a boy. The noise should subside, and he will be able to hear again. When John gets back he can take a look."

Stephen rounded the corner, almost colliding with Wills. "Wills!" he shouted, recognizing him by the stink on his clothes, and knowing where Reddy had had to hide from the Germans.

Wills took Stephen's hand and set it to his face so that his friend might 'see' him.

"I shall need you to fashion Dick a box, if you can. There is good wood, as you know, in the shed near the east barn."

Wills nodded his head in agreement into La Salle's still moving fingers.

Robin and he then guided Stephen's hands down to Dick and the trio lifted the boy's body and placed it, respectfully, on the plank across the two chairs.

Stephen sat himself down in a nearby chair, preparing to sit vigil over his friend.

"Robin," said Marion, thinking she might as well be the one to tell him, "it was Geis. Geis who came here."

One look at Robin, and Wills hurriedly announced that he would go re-light the kitchen stove.

The black expression that clouded Robin's face at the name, and the knowledge of yet another evil the Lieutenant had enacted, caused her to try and step closer to Robin, thinking perhaps there was some comfort or distraction she might give him. But he rejected her advance, and instead announced, all business, "I need a shirt. When Stephen can better hear we will ask him about borrowing a frock from his wife's old clothes-assuming she left any behind."

"She left him?" Marion asked, her eyes straying compassionately to the seated rector.

"E- _vac_ -uated." Robin answered her, quite crisply, as if determined to illustrate that not  _all_  men could expect to be left by the women they love. Not all men must wrestle with ongoing feminine infidelity, no matter how compulsory, no matter how feigned.

She was ready with a tart rejoinder when three men (including Wills) came stomping through the narrow hall, one after the other-no room for them to walk abreast-to the archway.

"Lost yer shirt, Lavender Boy?" offered Royston in cheeky greeting to his superior officer, Oxley. But his eyes soon alighted on Stephen, and then Dick's lying-in-honor body, and his attitude of casual frankness evaporated.

John did little but glimpse Stephen and immediately disappeared to dig out his medic kit from where it was hidden.

Wills stepped back into the room among them for the second time, his demeanor quieter, if possible, than before. "I found this," he handed Robin the heavy Braille volume Gisbonnhoffer had so recently tried to obliterate, "in the cooker's fire. Or, what was left of the fire."

Robin's eyebrows drew together in puzzlement, he glanced toward Stephen. Robin shook his head in the negative. Stephen's most precious possession? No, he would not seek to destroy it.

"It sounds like Geis," Marion offered, truly, tiring of bringing up the name.

Wills turned the holy book onto its back to show the once-heavily embossed front cover and binding. It was deeply charred beyond salvaging. He opened the cover to the first pages that would hold an elaborate frontispiece in a sighted-person's Bible, perhaps of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. They were all there, every page, undamaged. His voice was slightly uncertain. "I think it put the fire out."

Marion connected the dots. "The fire that was meant to consume it."

Wills raised his eyebrows as her only reply.

"If you were less odious at present, Wills," Robin offered, "I daresay we would smell the smoke off it even now." He inclined his head toward Stephen. "Give it to him. It is what he needs most in this moment, I suspect. That, and some medical attention, which Johnson is about to square away."

Wills stepped through the arch to deliver the volume to Stephen, who had no idea of anything that had become of it in the wake of the shots to his eardrums.

More arrivals came from the yard, spilling into the farmhouse, the nattering of Bonchurch calling Robin and Marion back toward the kitchen, Royston following.

"They are come here?" Marion asked, dismayed, assuming their destination of safety had been other.

"Yes," Robin agreed, his tone again returned to terse. "They came by another way than us."

"That took longer?"

"Well, it were Mitch," Royston offered, helpfully. "Walks slower when he talks, you know."

Robin entered the kitchen to see the Gypsy and the flier being handed each a fist-full of bread by Mitch, who did not stint in tearing a generous one off for himself as well.

Carter and Djak stood without seating themselves at table, as though they were not entirely welcome. Robin's attitude toward them certainly did nothing to allay such feelings.

" _Him_ , I do not like," he said, pointing at the flier, who had perhaps been going to offer an explanation or apology, but who stopped abruptly in his speaking, and his chewing, at Robin's entrance. "Take him to Rufford's for the night. The boy may stay here."

"Carter says-" Mitch stalled out at the cold look he got from Robin. " _Heeeee_  says the boy does not speak English, or German. He speaks some...Russian."

Wills had entered the room, as usual making little noise to announce his presence. "None of us know Russian, unless...Lady Marion?"

"No," Marion said.

Robin spoke the order. "Very well, Wills, go with them-to the Ruffords'."

"And what, learn Russian? Overnight?"

"Soldier, you are Communications Officer, yes? Once  _this man_  is gone, we have to have a way to communicate with the boy. Get him to start teaching you whatever language he speaks. Think of him as your new best friend, your conscience, your liver, even. Stick close. Your lessons begin tonight."

"Yessir," nodded Wills, uncertainly, walking over toward the newly-arrived trio.

"What is going on?" Djak asked of Carter, in a rare-for-her moment of curiosity.

"This man," Carter nodded toward Wills. "You are to teach him the language of the Rom, of your people, so that he may communicate with you."

Wills had taken his place beside her, also getting himself a helping of bread for the road.

"He smells like  _shit_ ," Djak said, wrinkling her nose.

"At least he does not look at you wishing for your liver in a pate."

She scoffed. " _I_  did not try and kill the  _rom baro_ 's wife."

"What's he sayin' to you?" Wills asked, Robin still staring daggers at the flier.

"Erm, he thinks... _you_ ," Carter indicated Robin, though reluctantly, "are ' _rom baro_ ' here. The tribal leader, on account of what he has seen of you so far...and of, what he takes to be, your...aggressive wife." His eyes flicked behind Robin to where Marion stood. "A necessary qualification of that leadership position, if I remember right."

"Having a bossy wife?" Mitch asked, mouth half-full of bread. Immediately he back-tracked. "Not that you, Lady Marion, are...hmm. We had better go, the later we arrive, the more it will discomfit the Ruffords." He hustled and hurried them out of the kitchen, and away from Robin, and Blind La Salle's farm.

 

* * *

"Sit here, Marion," Robin offered her a spot at the table. "I am sorry there is nothing warm to eat."

"Go and see to your other men, Robin," she told him, knowing it was what he wished-what he needed-to do. "I will not leave."

He smiled faintly at her very small joke, and went to further sort their situation.

 

* * *

He found John tending to Stephen, placing swathes of gauze over the former rector's ears.

"Ought you pad his ears so, when he already cannot hear us?" Robin queried.

"His hearing should return. Already I think the ringing and noise is dying down for him. He can hear some. The gauze is to help in fighting the next battle, possible infection."

"Tomorrow we must get him to the island doctor." The bitter in Robin's tone was not lost on the unit's medic.

"Aye," agreed the big man, knowing that his job and training was more trauma than surgery work, having been but a mineworker before the war.

Stephen had apparently caught the sound of Robin's speech as well. He reached out for his friend's hand, Bible still in his lap. "Robin," he no longer shouted. "Do not think me a fool. Does it not say in Matthew: which of you, when your son asks for bread will give him a stone, or when he asks for a fish will give him a serpent? These Germans are not our fathers, nor do they seek to do the Lord's work. We should expect no kindness in their treatment. We would be wrong, catastrophically so, to expect to find any there. Come, you have found the Lady Marion? The flier? Then let us be thankful. Thankful that Dick accomplished what he set out to do. Our Father will  _certainly_  not reward his sacrifice with a stone, or serpent."

To this, Robin found he had no reply. In this moment, after the experience and reveal of the last few hours, he was certainly not convinced that the flier was worth the life of young Dick Giddons. But he had no desire to share such bleak thoughts with Stephen, mourning the death of his almost-son, Dick.

In the ensuing silence, John excused himself to go in the kitchen, and at Robin's desire, have a look at Marion, and what he could do for her.

 

* * *

Robin heard the kitchen door to the barnyard creak open and scrape closed. At this he entered the kitchen. John remained at table. It was Marion who had stepped outside.

"I canna medic her, Robin."

Robin's mind attempted to reject the thought. "It is so bad, the cut? A grave wound?"

"Nay, 'tis not so bad, but could use stitches to best heal, as could the slash on her cheek."

"So do it."

"I say I canna."

Oxley's blood, already at a simmer, bubbled over into a roiling boil. "You defy my direct orders? You seek to subvert your commanding officer? On what grounds, Johnson?"

John met his fury with predictably methodical explanation. "I canna medic her if you are to return her to Gisbonnhoffer. There is but a single doctor on the island, and not even a veterinarian in addition. How, then, will you explain the stitching? Or, even, the cleaning and binding of her wounds?" He began to stow the now-unneeded supplies in his medic bag. "As a friend I say I am sorry, as a soldier I offer the suggestion that she must stay as she is, and must 'sleep rough' for the night if her cover story is to be maintained."

Several long silences passed, during which Royston found his way to the kitchen, his interest piqued by the shouting. He moved to put the coffee pot on the again-blazing cast-iron range.

Finally, Robin lifted his head from where he had been studying at the oilcloth on how to regain a moment's composure. "You are right," he told John, his voice steady but guarded. "Very well, bring me all available blankets in the house."

"And wotcher gonna do with those?" Royston's eyes showed equal parts wariness and impertinence.

Robin's top blew. "I WILL NOT HAVE HER COLD any longer! You say she must not be medicked. You deny her a wash, counsel against a change of clothes; socks, even, for her mangled feet, salve for her wrists. Very well. I submit to all your demands. She will go back to Gisbonnhoffer. But not now. NOT TONIGHT!" Robin turned toward the door, only to see the pale-in-the-light-of-his-anger face of the returning Bonchurch. "Mitch!" Robin ordered, without explanation. "Post a guard on the barn." His voice seethed. "I leave you in charge."

Robin accepted the handover of the hastily gathered quilted blankets with unconcealed frustration and contempt for his fellows, and stalked off carrying them toward the animal barn nearest the house.

"They are right, you know," Marion said, when he got there.

"You heard them?" there was no longer any fight in his voice.

"Oh, I am an accomplished spy now. I made it my point to listen. You cannot hand me back over to Geis if I am made well, tended to in any way." She took a breath, let it out. "He shall wish to see to that himself." She watched Robin's eyes change. "Any aid I receive here will only birth questions as to why I was not brought immediately to the garrison upon being found. It is best this way. No," she encouraged him to place the blankets not where he was headed, up into the hayloft, but in a cleaned-out, but unoccupied stall between two others holding each, one Jersey cow and one still-nursing calf. "It will prove warmer here," she instructed him.

"You are very cold, aren't you?"

"I know it is not such a severe temperature outside, yet I cannot seem to hold any heat to my bones."

"Come, I shall cover you over in blankets as though you are the venerated, ancient Queen of some country or another, drowning in comforters and coverlets upon your royal bed." He had thrown in several heapings of fresh straw onto the stall's floor near the wall (up against which, on the other side, the large cow lay with her calf), and had placed two quilted blankets to prevent straw pricking through.

She got down on them, though 'sleeping rough' was a too-polite term for such lodgings, and Robin proceeded to pile the other bedding atop her. She still wore his knit jumper.

He looked down at her, "I daresay you are thinking of home, soft beds and starched linens, hot water bottles and warm milk. Of wishing you were there now."

She blinked slowly, disinterested in taking her eyes off him for too long. "I don't want to be home, to be back in Britain, tonight of all nights, Robin. I want to be here, like this, with you." It was a bold declaration, the kind she might have trembled to make to him in their pre-War romance. But there was a depth of truth in it that she was not even sure that he could understand. She did not wish for the past, her old home, or even old times-old affluence, the softness and comforts riches could buy. There was something about all of that that made her wonder, even, if  _this_  Marion, the Marion whom she had become, could navigate such a world-certainly she did not feel she wished to. She wished only for this  _now_ , with this man. No matter that her swollen, cracked lips were spoiled for kissing, her body too pained for other expressions of love.

Robin studied her from where he stood, going down on one knee to bring himself closer to her. He had never been one to be as shocked at the daring things she said or did, as she was to say or do them. "I think I understand now why my father never remarried," he told her.

Her face asked the question her voice did not.

"He once told me that he had given his heart to my mother, and as she died never having returned it, he could not see his way clear to marrying another, as he had no heart to offer, and pledging something to them no longer in his possession would be utterly fraudulent, and cruel." He did not bother to spell out his meaning, or draw any parallels to it.

Again she let her eyes close for just a moment. "Come and put your arms around me, then, if you are going to tell me such things. Help me forget how I must look to you tonight. Let me fall asleep embraced. Just this one night. The only night I shall ever care about again."

At this invitation, Robin got down on the blanket-covered straw that was to serve as a mattress, and lay so that she might best fit herself to him, his response passive to let her best choose how to keep her injuries from being further hurt. "I know it was said in a strange moment, Marion," he confessed, his voice now able to be low as it was near to her ear. "But it is true. I do  _love_  you."

She felt the push emotion that was to set upon her shortly, but bit it back long enough to assure him, "I have always been sure of you, Robin." And so she had, long before he encouraged her to be so via a note in a tiny indigo-glass bottle. "It is what made losing you so...beyond bearable." And the emotion broke over the dam she had long ago erected, and she wept into him, hard and fast, unselfconsciously, a storm years in the making.

He did not try and stop her, did not chastise her that it took so long to finally come out of her from where it had been brewing, and she had been stifling it. He did not ask aloud where this storm had been the night in the maze, or later at the windmill. Whether it had blown up on her some other night at Barnsdale when she was alone, causing her to howl into her pillow. He did not even interrupt her to apologize for his agreeing to the 'no survivors' scheme of his military superiors, to tell her that he had been wrong, or that he perhaps thought so now, even had he not thought so then.

Only, after the storm had begun to abate, her energy and emotions spent, she heard him humming, deep in his chest, words to a song they both knew by heart well-enough that they need not vocalize lyrics to the tune. " _Someday, when I'm awfully low/And the world is cold/I will feel a glow just thinking of you/And the way you look tonight./Oh, but you're lovely/With your smile so warm/And your cheek so soft/There is nothing for me but to love you/Just the way you look tonight./Lovely, never never change/Keep that breathless charm/Won't you please arrange it, 'cause I love you,/Just the way you look tonight_." She planted a kiss onto his shirt, near where her head was rested, not too far from the wet-with-tears spot she had just made.

"Marion," he said. "Go to sleep now, I will not leave you."

But she did not hear him, her breath suddenly even, measured in slumber, her fists gripping the fabric of his borrowed shirt.

He lay there with her in his arms, even, one might say, in his bed. He let his hand rest on the crown of her head, her hair soft and dark, yet so entirely different an experience than he had had mere days before when he stroked its considerable length as she slept unsuspectingly in her bed at Barnsdale.

Had she not stopped him he  _would_  have killed Thomas Carter. War had given that to him. This life of Resistance, of some days base survival, had given that to him: not only the ability to kill, but the taste for it as well.

A pre-War brawl at home would have been just that: a brawl. Fists thrown, perhaps a pub damaged, trip to the magistrate next morning to explain what he could recall of the cause of the scrap. Fine paid, opponent's hand shook in general goodwill. But now, now the same feelings that might have sparked fisticuffs then were quick to morph into 'to the death', with a vengeance. He sighed.

There were a thousand things times two he should be seeing to. Where they must all scatter to after tonight (Stephen's not being safe for more than one of them at the present time). How they could manage to put a stop to Gisbonnhoffer's search for the flier. How Dick's family might be compensated (monetarily, at least) for his death. What to do with the unexpected appearance of the escaped Gypsy boy.

And, foremost, how the devil he was going to be able to look at Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer and  _willingly_  hand over the most precious thing in his world, this very thing (this hurt and wounded thing) he held so delicately now, as though perfectly tailored to fit his side...how to seem to surrender her while keeping that all-but ungovernable war-born bloodlust in check.

**...TBC...**


	20. Chapter 20

**Sark - Dixcart Hotel - Early morning, Sunday, 17 October, 1943 -**  What passed for the lobby of the hotel was littered with off-duty German soldiers in various states of undress, various states of repose, and various states of sobriety. It was nearly two a.m., and Allen Dale (alias Dale Allen, the Kommandant Vaiser's islander driver), had packed up his cards and pocketed his dice an hour prior, bedding down in the pre-Occupation private room that now housed five Germans and himself. Having won the right in a fortuitous bet,  _he_  slept alone.

His sleep (and single bed) were shortly disturbed, though, by none other than the Kommandant's Lieutenant from the Alderney Treeton Camp, Gisbonnhoffer. Had Allen not been especially light on his feet where his cover story was concerned, his mind nimble even when unexpectedly interrupted, in his haze of waking he might have verbally let fly a considerable lack of delight at such a disturbance. As it was, he settled on a noncommittal grunt.

"Out of your bed, Man, I've work for you."

"Howzat?"

"You are paid to be the Kommandant's boy, yes? If he thinks you fine enough to serve him, you shall do me quite as well."

Allan's eyebrows had trouble staying on his forehead, in wake of what he  _thought_  the Lieutenant was proposing, what he  _thought_  the Lieutenant took to be the nature of his and the Kommandant's work-arrangement. " _Howz_ at?"

Gisbonnhoffer's lip curled in disgust at Dale's distasteful assumption. "What news know you of the Nightwatch?"

Without giving his relief away, he subtly caught his breath. "Sorry?"

"Don't feign ignorance to me, Driver. What news of the Nightwatch?"

"Wait. Let me check. Are we allowed to listen to wireless now?" Allen pretended, comically, to count on his fingers. "When first you lot arrived, you said, ' _Ja, no problem_ '. Then a few weeks later it was, ' _nine_ '. Then it was ' _ja_ ', again for a bit, until you confiscated all wirelesses on the islands and banned any radio listening. So, if memory serves...no, I have no news of the Nightwatch..." he shrugged, "other than the Kommandant's been away to Guernsey trying to sort her before the OberAdmiral's arrival."

Geis' voice was low and irritated that he was being led on a conversation of discovery rather than one of full-disclosure up-front.  _Just like an islander_. "And how is he trying to do that?"

"He's got clerks at researching travel documents."

Though he had been the one inquiring, the one who certainly expected to be answered, Gisbonnhoffer spoke archly, "You speak freely enough on Herr Vaiser's business."

"To his colleague, sure. Wot 'ave I to hide? It ain't like he speaks his secrets in the motorcar thinkin' I can't hear him while I've got me back turned, is it?"

Without further speech, Gisbonnhoffer made to exit the room, stopping in the doorway. He turned and looked to Allen as though he expected him to join him. Allen sat up and pulled on his boots, rubbing his jaw, still surprised by the ever-increasing stubble sprouted there, certainly an unacceptable grooming choice had he been regular Army.

He followed the enigmatic Lieutenant into the hotel's upstairs hallway, down the main stair, and out onto the hotel's porch.

 

* * *

**Sark - Barn of La Salle -**  She supposed she was used to being up at such a time of night. Of course she was. She was not, no matter what the general public of the islands might think, used to lying with a man, though she reckoned they would have been surprised to find it was a Briton, a Royal Army officer, now warmly beside her,  _not_  a German Lieutenant, still half in her bruised embrace.

Too warmly, perhaps. Too...fidgety.  _That_  was what had awakened her, more than the coming-on time for the Nightwatch that would have to go unbroadcast, abandoned yet again.

Beside her, Robin trembled, prompting her to try and make out his features in the barn's darkness.  _Was he awake? Or was it a dream that wracked him so?_  His arms, rather than holding her more tightly, seemed to forget that she was there. Certainly they recalled not the barn, the farm, the long hours just passed in quiet, blissful slumber. Undisturbed slumber.

His fists gripped at the blankets about him, about his own clothes. "The sea," he shouted, "backs to it, Boys, and dig in!" But his voice did not echo the cheerful tone those words seemed to imply.

She did not know whether to try and quieten him or simply wait it out. It was when he began shouting other orders, his breathing changing up into racking gasps as he still commanded men on a beach, that she first reached for him. "Easy," she said, "steady on, Soldier." It seemed the right way to address him, somehow.

He had sat up, and so she ignored the twinges and tautness of her own pains, and did so as well. He shouted again, louder, even, this time.

She did not think his shouts would endanger them in any way, but something within her mind cruelly pointed out to her that none of the other men had come running, which certainly seemed to indicate that such night terrors were not out-of-the-ordinary within their unit.

"Come now," she tried to soothe Robin. "It is done." She put her hand to his sweat-drenched face, and his eyes opened, a fog only just beginning to lift from them.

"Dunkirk," she said, guessing at the cause, refusing to be afraid of the name.

He did not agree with nor deny the placename. He took her hand from his face, and kissed its palm, placing its bareness inside his shirt, over his heart. "No," he said, his voice still erratic and just losing the panting of the stress from the nightmare. "I dreamed we were home, at Kirk Leaves, ensconced in my rooms there (someday I shall describe them for you, as you always refused to follow me into them...), the war far away, or never-had-been. It was a Sunday morning, and I was happy, just to lay in bed and look at you, the slant of your eyelashes. The bareness of your shoulder as it peeked out from under the goose down duvet. Yes," he informed her, the usual pertness in his tone replaced by a dreamlike wistfulness, "you are sleeping bare."

She could not see the glint of tears on his cheek, but she knew they were now there.

"Is it sensible to say that that is why I fight? To preserve a moment that never was? The simplicity, the peace of a world in its right mind, so that I may let it tend to itself of a Sunday morning while I look at Marion? At  _my_  Marion? And so that she may take a break from speech-writing, and monograph editing and publicly decrying injustice long enough to safely rest in my arms? Long enough that someone may care for  _her_  just as she cares for the World?" He shook his head. "That is all I remember of my dreams this night. After that, nothing."

"Dunkirk," she said again, almost a prompt.

He sank back onto the blanket-covered straw. All the air came out of him as he deflated before her eyes. "As you have read."

She shook her head. "But I have  _not_  read. I know only what BBC Radio reported of it: the heroism. I expect it was a far-less heroic experience in person."

"Thousands," he said, "thousands of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of us, the German Devil and their panzer units to the South, pressing us ever-backward into the sea, until all that was under our feet was literal, shifting sand. Nowhere to retreat, nowhere to re-group, no military transports coming, only the bullets to our breast and the Atlantic to our arses." He took a breath, "It was to be the unit's only full-on battle. After that, once returned to England, we were taken entirely off piste.  _Before that_  we had a second set of six, making our number a full-on dozen."

She responded to the self-disgust in his voice. "And you are to blame for the loss of those six?"

He scoffed. "You do not say, 'you blame yourself for the six?' You do not attempt to talk me out of it?" It was like her, never to step into the hollow, unconsidered disingenuousness others might.

"I don't know what happened," she told him, her pragmatism trumping any knee-jerk compassion expected of a 'Lady'. "Perhaps you may be right to blame yourself for their loss. The war came to us within the month. I never even saw a non-island newspaper that had reporting on Dunkirk, or its battle."

"Then I will tell you; Dunkirk, the city, is no more. Not a stone left set upon another, thirty-thousand residents scattered or dead." Quickly, as was his way, he spun the course of their conversation in a different direction. "Can we talk about tomorrow? Can we make our plans?"

"No," she denied him. "It is today, already. But I will not speak of any plans before dawn. That, at least, is a promise you  _may_  make that I will accept." She risked a small stretching of her back. " _Now_  you may talk to me of other things, or you may sleep, but I will have no planning in my bed."

He did not say that he had already come, quite quickly, to think of it as  _his_  bed. "I saw your father." He did not think it best to elaborate on their meeting. "Eva was with him. Did you know? She has given me Clem's boat. I think we must christen her something." Hurriedly, he added, "I have not told the others how I came by it, nor do I plan to, should her involvement with us become important."

"Eva knew about the boat? You have sailed her?" Marion's traumatized mouth almost pulled into a smile of delight. "Is she quite fit?"

Robin smiled at Marion's immediate interest. "Well up to the task at hand. Would that I could sail you to Barnsdale in her."

She did not let him trick her into a conversation about Geis, about the coming day. "Do you suppose anyone is missing the Nightwatch? That anyone has stopped to wonder where she has gone? It is several nights, now."

"Well," he told her, finding it humorous that she fretted over whether anyone was listening to, hearkening to, her nightly rebellion. "Allen, at least, has suffered a recent broken heart on her account." Robin tried to draw her back down to him, to the blankets and what padding the straw offered. "Marion, say that you love me. It has not escaped my notice that in all this you have not, though to an observer I daresay the truth of such is undeniable. And to any interpreter your speech and actions combine to illustrate same. But it is not the same."

She knew exactly the smile that his face wore as he spoke his request. "You stupid man," she scolded him. "You make some things impossible. I love you so much that I know I shouldn't tell you, that I shouldn't say things that can't be carried through. That telling you that I love you hours before I must be thrown back into the arms of another man could be enough to push what little caution you exhibit out the window, baby with bathwater.  _There_ , now you have me talking about plans. Are you happy? Have I managed to delight you?"

His smile (though his facial expressions, in reality, were still but a dark night shadow to her in the stall) deepened about the corners. "Tell me again," he said, not minding the way she packaged her heart's declaration a bit. "It has been a long space between hearing it, and I find myself wishing to re-memorize what your lips look like in the saying of it." He coached her, "Say, 'Robin'. Say, 'I love you,  _Robin_ '. Now, ' _Robin_ , I love you'." He laughed as he tutored her further, but she saw it, in the last helpings of moonlight on that night, before it would fade into dawn, she saw the small tears, again upon his cheek.

 

* * *

**Sark - Dixcart Hotel -**  "Find it for me," Gisbonnhoffer ordered the Kommandant's driver.

"Sorry?"

"The hotel's radio."

"Haven't got a radio, remember? You lot confiscated them all."

"I begin to lose my patience with you, Driver. I should not wish to report to Herr Vaiser that you were impeding my search and rescue activities whilst on this island. A man like you, I would think, would prefer to  _keep_  his well-paying position, the level of power it might provide in the climate of Occupation... _and_  his freedom."

"Well, if they have got one, I've never seen it-nor heard it. Likely they would only have a homemade crystal set, anyway."

"Then find  _it_. I shall wait. But do not be too long, the Nightwatch will start soon."

Sadly it was no trick, even, to find it, so poorly had it been stashed. Allen's heart fell a little at having to produce it for the Lieutenant, but he consoled himself that he might scrounge another one for the hotelier and his family in the weeks ahead, and replace this set. After all, his personal philosophy had long been: to him who most has need of it, belongs the spoils. Tonight, for his own safety, he had need of this.

It was not a pretty scene when the set, though in working order, failed to produce the voice of the Nightwatch.

"She is not there," Gisbonnhoffer marveled. "Of all the times, all the nights, she is not there. It is a clue, but how queer that she leaves it for me now..."

"It is not the first night she has fallen silent," spoke a voice Gisbonnhoffer originally took for Allen's, only to then sight an arriving Diefortner over the islander's shoulder. "You knew this, and yet you did not tell me?"

"Your mind, Sir, I understood to be better concentrated on other things. As Herr Kommandant's driver told you,"

_Now how did he know that?_  Geis ground his molars. "Listening at keyholes again, Underlieutenant?"

Diefortner ignored the verbal baiting, continuing, "he is sorting out the situation before the OberAdmiral's arrival on Guernsey. He has silenced the Nightwatch."

"What was her name?" Gisbonnhoffer asked, such was his investment, his personal hopes of solving the puzzle he still did not fully grasp that they were dashed in the wake of such news.

" _That_  he has yet to sort. He has been taking women with Canadian- and American-stamped passports and sequestering them. The first night the Nightwatch fell silent he shot those in custody. The second night, as well. Doubtless, just to be sure, he will see to it tonight's are treated likewise."

"How many's he shootin'?" asked Allen, disgusted with himself that his own tone could be so perfectly, casually quizzical.

"Fourteen, I believe, to date," Diefortner replied, after consulting his notebook.

Allen looked from one German in this pissing match to the other, and swallowed back the number he had just been told, adding it into the velocity needed, in his newly-formulating equation, to reach Blind La Salle's farm as quickly as possible.

 

* * *

**Farm of Blind La Salle -**  After dawn, but not by much. It has been decided that Marion will be given as big a breakfast as she wishes to eat before being taken to the German garrison. She is seated next to Stephen at table, where she has found long pulls on fresh, still-warm milk the best tonic for her under-nourished-of-late stomach.

"There is a way," Stephen began, and she only half-turned to him, assuming he was speaking to someone else present. But neither John nor Mitch, Royston nor Robin seemed to have heard him, as they carried on with their generous platefuls of victuals.

"Sir?" she asked, not sure how to address him.

"I was only saying that I wished to tell you, before you must go back to the double life you lead, that, there is still a way to do all that you do,  _and_  find love." He smiled, and she found herself out of her depth, trying to look into his unreadable eyes to better know what he had seen about her that might have prompted such an announcement from him.

"Why do you say this to  _me_?" she asked, hoping her abrupt tone would not track as harsh.

"It is only," he told her, "the way that you lay your teaspoon just now."

She turned quickly to consult its orientation upon her saucer, taken in.

"And that Mitch, who sat with Dick and me some of the night can speak of little else just now, other than you and Robin." The rector laughed a small laugh to himself, as though he could almost see the bewilderment on her face. But his humor was not lasting. "Robin's care of you is evident to all. It is because of this I counsel that you not let him be the one to venture to the garrison with you, for the handoff. Say your farewell here, in safety. The new German reprisals for killing soldiers and officers have already proven quite dear this week."

Her mind flashed, with difficulty, on the young officer dead by Carter's bullet. "Reprisals?"

"Twenty-five  _anes_ ," Stephen used the local pet name of 'donkeys' for the Guernsey people, "shot on market day, without regard to age or gender. I do not think any of us wish such high stakes be riding on Robin's control of his temper (however admirably in defense of you), should he be the one to meet up with this Lieutenant. Ask for Mitch to take you. There will be less to betray him in his eyes."

"Truly, Robin," Mitch was saying from his place at table, "the plan, what there was of it, proved a dud, but it all came right in the end, hasn't it?"

"'All came right in the end', Mitch? How so? Dick lies even now in yonder parlor, with us yet to dig his grave, Marion sits just there, hurt and ill-used. Twenty-five dead in Guernsey, Stephen's boat lost to the sea, lost to us...And the flier, well," Robin scoffed, "the flier is an entirely other matter."

"Oh," as usual, Mitch rushed in where angels feared, "now see, I rather liked Carter. I was...just trying to be positive, you know. My mother (may she forgive me for letting her think me dead) used to always say even on a bad day there's always something good. That's all I was doing. Looking for the good bit."

 

* * *

**Nearby - Mrs. Abby Rufford's tenement -**  RAF Flight Commander Thomas Carter could not recall how long it had been since he had been in a home, like this, while it yet still functioned as a home, not a mere dwelling, a house not to be solely thought of strategically for its battlefield position, nor in what possible plunder it might hold. A true home whose closets and cellar and attic held home-like things such as coats and canned goods, umbrellas and last year's Christmas tinsel, not empty, abandoned spaces for hiding men or weapons, for packing with explosives.

He could only vaguely recall sitting down at table not in a restaurant, not in a mess hall, not eating from a tin or packet of bits of dried RAF provender whilst in a cockpit, but eating at a family table, under a single light, on a well-worn tablecloth, where perhaps all the silver did not match in pattern (as it might in a London cafe), where food was passed from person to person in bowls or on platters.

The entire breakfast struck him as miraculous. Almost, as a return to life, as though he might have done more in the past days than simply escape the camp and evade re-capture, but that he might, he just might, have begun to re-become human, to re-join the race of Man.

Thomas Carter still wished to fly this place, to, in fact, take to the air again at the controls of a Spitfire. But the rush and urge to do so were in this moment perhaps not so extreme. He looked at Wills Reddy, seated next to the young Mrs. Rufford. He already liked the man, his steady taking-in of the world around him, his clearly considered responses showing a level-head and a fair mind at work.

Carter watched the clutch of Rufford children, some old enough to be of aid on the farm, others not yet ready to leave the house unsupervised; watched the Gypsy boy's study of them. Young Djak seemed to find some familiar warmth here among the bodies of so many, the largeness of the family structure perhaps recalling to him some of his pre-war life among the large extended family and endless kin of Romany society.

Still, Carter chuckled to himself as he watched the boy pocket three extra sugar cubes and a table knife when he thought no one was looking. Steel-trap mind ever toward the capricious future. Well, he would have to say something to him about that, taking Mrs. Rufford's tableware. But not right now. Right now he would enjoy the display of fellowship before him, even if he, himself, were not yet quite ready to take part.

"More coffee?" asked the oldest Rufford boy, to his left, clearly impressed by Carter's RAF uniform (though it was nearly in threads at this point).

"No, thank you," he replied, smiling at the boy's eagerness. "Water, actually. I'd like a tall glass of water."

 

* * *

**Sark - German Garrison - still morning -**  Allen Dale had, uncharacteristically, not been able to skive off from Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer since initially being cornered by him for the Nightwatch, nor nip away when Underlieutenant Diefortner wasn't looking. To his great chagrin (and disgust) he was still engaged with them both, accomplishing, well, very little, to be exact.

It was decided they would journey to the east harbor of Creux, a popular spot for fisherman, and while there they would canvass (a polite way to say 'openly interrogate, if necessary') the locals about anything out-of-the-ordinary they might have seen, such as someone else-not Dick Giddons-piloting La Salle's boat.

Once arrived at Creux, Allen begged off for a moment, saying he was taking the man-made tunnel access down to sea-level to relieve himself in the Atlantic. He spoke the excuse far-more colorfully, causing a grimace from both his momentary overlords, a rolling of the eyes at the crass unsophistication of the locals, and in doing so gained a moment of freedom.

Perhaps among the boats he might encounter a mutual friend of the unit's, or, even, one of his fellows going about a cover-duty for the day. Any way to get this news of further (and further possible) reprisals off his chest.

What Allen had not expected was to find Bonchurch gently leading the Lady Marion Nighten up the same tunnel in the rock he, himself, was descending. Quickly he threw a glance to his back: the opening of the tunnel showed no one following, no one looking down in any effort to assure themselves he was doing as he had said he would.

Allen's quick eyes and speedy ability to read any situation swiftly assessed the injured status of the Lady Marion. "Mitch," he hissed to Bonchurch, taking one of Marion's arms in an effort to both help her on the uneven stone-stepped ground, and get closer to them to facilitate an information exchange, "you have a story for the missing flier?"

Bonchurch grunted a yes.

Allen kept his eyes straight ahead as he spoke. It would do no good to seem too familiar with his fellow. "The news is seven Guernsey women held and executed each night the Nightwatch does not air."

Upon hearing this, Marion slipped on the rock under her bare, wounded feet, and both men had to catch her with their strength.

"Chin up, Pet," said Allen, in no hurry to speed their progress upward. "Herr Geis will see you patched good as Old Dame Dob, and we will get you sent home, if he does not take you there first." He smiled to her. He did not let himself react to her hair, nor the shambles of her attire and many cuts. There was no time for such reflection or unable-to-be-acted-upon compassion. "Careful with him, though," he warned of Geis, "he is on a war-path over the Nightwatch. Seems to have taken on finding her as a personal campaign. Mind your step." He could have been talking about her interaction with her German fiance, or the still slick footing of their continuing, cramped-at-three-abreast ascent.

Mitch made to speak. "There is grave news at the farm. Do not go too long without checking in," was all Bonchurch had time to say before Gisbonnhoffer shouted down to them, "What's that, there, Driver?"

And things began to happen very quickly.

Herr Geis was down the narrow tunnel to them fast as a lightning strike and twice as electrified, Marion whisked from her position between the two undercover British operatives, and into his arms, where he lifted her, taking the remaining tiered steps some three at a time until he reached daylight and open air.

An onslaught of German swearing, German orders, and German questions ensued, sometimes in such a flurry not even Dale's quick-study ears could translate it fast enough for his mind. As neither he nor Mitch were supposed to understand Jerry-lingo, they stood obediently to the side until they were questioned in English.

Gisbonnhoffer lit into Mitch with a vengeance, his questions quick and harshly staccato, but even so he did not prove particularly suspicious of Mitch's cover story as a local fisherman who had found the Lady Marion wandering among the sea-level caves early this morning, having, at her request, brought her here on their way to the German garrison.

Momentarily, as Diefortner sent for a boat to get them-in Gisbonnhoffer's words, 'off this cursed rock'-Herr Geis turned his eye to Allen, dismissing him by instructing the driver that he, 'best get to work'. The German Lieutenant, who had had called for a stretcher for Lady Marion, then turned his back toward them, and Allen worried to see how easily he (or anyone watching) could tell Mitch was exhaling in deep relief.

Stepping away from them toward the promptly arriving vessel, Gisbonnhoffer threw one final order over his departing shoulder, to the attachment of armed soldiers that had come with the stretcher. "Bring the fisherman, too," he commanded, his tone almost bored with the idea, as of one simply tying up loose ends. "If we cannot present the flier to Herr Kommandant, this-pipsqueak-will have to do... _for now_."

Mitch startled at the declaration, at the announcement of his imminent captivity, his feet acting as though he might run, looking of  _le lapin_ , the rabbits the people of Alderney were affectionately known as (surely where he was shortly to be taken), but strong hands were upon him immediately, blocking any opportunity for escape or aid.

Allen Dale stood, his outward expression as cold as might be for any man being taken away that he cared nothing for, that he had just met. Certainly not wearing the expression of a man whose life had once been saved by the German's newest prisoner, whose once long-convalescence in an Royal Army hospital bed was sped along (and cheered) by the companionship of same now-detained man. No, he stood impassive, outside of it all as their boat sped away, the motor disturbing the water, creating an ever-widening wake.

From this place on shore Allen could see the ragged hair on the head of the Lady Marion, the look of Mitch's face upon being taken into German custody. But his mind could think only of Robin, of La Salle's, of where at Creux he might find a bike, a tractor, a pair of skates, even, to speed his desperate journey there.

His eyes shifted to his left, to his right, at what soldiers-what enemies-yet remained. No one was looking at him. His moment had come. (Too late, probably, but it  _had_  come.) Like dry sand in a wind gust, he scattered.

 

.+.+.

}}->  ** _The End_**

* * *

**...TBC**  in..."Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours"

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our Cast  
> Robert "Robin" Oxley, Viscount Huntingdon...Robin of Locksley, Earl of Huntingdon, aka the outlaw Robin Hood  
> The Lady Marion Nighten...Lady Marian of Knighton  
> Lieutenant, Herr Geis Gisbonnhoffer...Sir Guy of Gisborne  
> Island Kommandant Vaiser...Vaisey, Sheriff of Nottingham  
> Sir Edward Nighten, former Parliamentarian...Sir Edward of Knighton, former Sheriff of Nottingham
> 
> .+.+.  
> The rest of the "Saintly Six" -  
> Mitch Bonchurch, Navigation Officer...Much  
> William "Wills" Reddy, Communications Officer...Will Scarlet  
> Allen Dale, Reconnaissance and Acquisitions, alias Dale Allen, the Kommandant's driver...Allan-A-Dale  
> Richard Royston, Explosives...Royston "Roy" White  
> Iain "John" Johnson, Medic...Little John Little
> 
> .+.+.  
> Flight Commander Thomas Carter, aka Alexsei "Aliosha" Igorovich, Prince Komonoff...Carter, a knight Templar serving in the King's private guard from S2 "Get Carter!" and S2 "We Are Robin Hood". (His dead brother's name was Thomas).  
> Underlieutenant Diefortner...De Fourtnoy of S1 "Who Shot the Sheriff?" who briefly served as the Sheriff's Master-At-Arms  
> Gypsy Boy Djak...D'Jaq/Saffiya, Saracen slave/captive who joined Robin Hood's gang in S1 "Turk Flu"  
> Anya Grigorovna...Annie, kitchen wench and (heaven help her) mother of Gisborne's son, Seth, of S1 "Parent Hood"  
> Dick Giddons...Benedict Giddons, the Locksley flour thief who broke under torture and named Will and Luke Scarlet as his co-conspirators in S1 "Will You Tolerate This?".  
> Stephen "Blind" La Salle...Stephen, the blind architect and (seemingly hermit) teacher of S2 "Booby and the Beast"  
> Eva Heindl...Eve of Bonchurch, of S1 "A Thing or Two About Loyalty"  
> Tom Thatcher...Tom-A-Dale, on-the-make brother of Allan-A-Dale, hanged erroneously for Robin Hood's man in S1 "Brothers in Arms"  
> (U.S. 5th Army Captain) Fred Otto...the Booby; Count Friedrich Bertrand Otto von Wittelsbach, of the German duchy of Bavaria, of S2 "Booby and the Beast"  
> Lord Merton...Walter, Lord of Merton, noble conspirator and supporter of King Richard during Edward's plan to overthrow the Sheriff in S1 "A Clue: No", prior to that, a regular attendee of the Council of Nobles  
> Clem Nighten...Sir Clem of Knighton, an OC, Marian's older brother, as invented for my "Death Would Be Simpler to Deal With"  
> Jodderick, Bailiff of Guernsey...Jodderick, bailiff of Nottingham in S1 "Who Shot the Sheriff?" [yes, Guernsey's highest civilian official even, to this day, wears the title, 'bailiff']  
> Roger Stoker, Intelligence officer assigned to the British 8th Army...Roger of Stoke, knight loyal to King Richard, sent with an important letter by Robin, doomed at the word of Allan-A-Dale in S2 "Angel of Death"  
> OberAdmiral Jan Prinzer, highest ranking officer of the German Occupation force trying to overthrow King George's (Britain & the Crown's) control of the Channel Islands...Prince John, high-ranking member of the monarchy trying to overthrow King Richard's control of England, throughout the series  
> Mr. Thornton...Thornton of Locksley, faithful servant and (presumed) life-long friend of Robin Hood first introduced in S1 "Will You Tolerate This?"  
> Matthew, attache to the Bailiff...Matthew of Nettlestone, casualty of S1 "Who Shot the Sheriff?"  
> Mrs. Abby Rufford...Abbess of Rufford, fake member of the clergy working to thwart the Sheriff and rob Nottingham of its taxes in S1 "The Tax Man Cometh".
> 
> Our Locations  
> The Channel Island of Guernsey, and in particular the Barnsdale estate...Knighton, Village and Hall (named so after Barnsdale Forest)  
> The Channel Island of Sark...Sherwood Forest  
> The Channel Island of Alderney...Nottingham  
> Kirk Leaves, the Earl of Huntingdon's English country home...Locksley Village & Manor (named so for the series' oft-acknowledged safety of Kirklees Abbey)  
> Treeton Camp, Channel Island of Alderney...Treeton Village and Mines, where D'Jaq was brought as slave labor in S1 "Turk Flu"  
> The Bertrand-Otto Stables and Farm of Nicholasville, Kentucky, USA...the German Duchy of Bavaria (named so for the Booby, 'Friedrich Bertrand Otto...')  
> Farm of Blind La Salle, Channel Island of Sark...Outlaws' Camp
> 
> *Please see the author's ending note on "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" regarding the historical and geographical content, and use of unintentional anachronisms in this fictional work.


End file.
